momentum

In this ongoing series of videos, VestAndPage host conversations under existential focus with inspiring people from the arts, culture and science. In the form of shared contemplations, these dialogues search not to battle through opinions, but to raise crucial questions on our contemporaneity. The dialogues aspire to not accept any answer as ultimate, to allow for uncertainty, and to converge on a common ground in which shared knowledge is the fundament for continuous queries. Essential questions on existential concerns dig into the place of action in daily life. They touch subjects of humanity such as time, care, dualisms, love, transformation, consciousness, conflict, nature, and art. These encounters consist of people sharing their visions through unconventional, critical and divergent creative thinking, inspecting and dissecting contemporaneity while caring for humanity.

With Andrea Pagnes and Marilyn Arsem, Franko B, Stelarc, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and more.

  • VestAndPage
    Director
  • VestAndPage
    Writer
  • VestAndPage
    Producer
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Key Cast
  • Franko B
    Key Cast
  • Marilyn Arsem
    Key Cast
  • Lois Keidan
    Key Cast
  • Joseph Morgan Schofield
    Key Cast
  • Guillermo Gómez-Peña
    Key Cast
  • Stelarc
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Feature, Other
  • Genres:
    Series, Performance art, Experimental, Philosophy, Conversation, Dialogue, Art, Politics, Talks
  • Completion Date:
    January 6, 2021
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, Australia, Germany, Mexico, United Kingdom, United States
  • Language:
    English, Spanish
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - VestAndPage

Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together as VestAndPage and gained international recognition in the fields of performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing, and collective performance operas and temporary artistic community projects. For over a decade, VestAndPage have been exploring performance art and film as a phenomenon through their collaborative creative practice, as well as through theoretical artistic research and curatorial projects. Their works have been presented in museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas and a variety of sites worldwide. They are devoted to a poetic approach in experimental, personal filmmaking based on performance art, questioning the perception of reality, and how we process and store information. For VestAndPage, film can delude space-time, open the unconscious as a creative vessel, and reveal processes and relations by linking apparently disconnected persons, things and happenings.

Between 2010 and 2012 they produced their trilogy of performance-based short films "sin∞fin" in Antarctica, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and India. Between 2014 and 2018, VestAndPage produced "Plantain", an award-winning art film based on their month-long performance walk from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad in May/June 2015. The project is based on true historic events of the escape of Stenke's family in the civil exodus from former East Prussia in winter 1945. In 2020 they published "Poetics of Relations – A Manifesto On Performance-Based Filmmaking" as a video article inquiring their practice on the Journal of Embodied Research. The same year saw them producing "ANAM CARA – Mirror in the Mirror" through co-creation in lockdown with 22 international performance artists, as well as "AMOR AND PSYCHE (In Times of Plagues)", a short about the nature of breath.
They are currently in post-production for their performance-based feature "STRATA" on Deep Time, realized in collaboration with over 20 artists and scientists in the caves of the Swabian Jura. They are developing "momentum", a series of video conversations on existential subjects with people from the arts, culture and science.
They have authored and produced numerous other video art works and experimental shorts based on performance art.

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