Experiencing Interruptions?

Plantain

A performance-based experimental feature film produced and filmed on location during the month-long performance walk by artist duo VestAndPage from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad, in May/June 2015.

Taking a private family story and the historical event of post-WWII displacements as starting points, the film focuses on the issue of the replaced - displaced - in-place body. It questions how past and present speak to and through our bodies facing ethical, social and existential challenges. It investigates the process of acceptance of history, the individual and collective archiving, as well as concepts of identity and permeability of cultural borders. In 7 episodes, the film recalls with each one a member of the family, to look into time, mystery, war, duty, courage, trauma and fidelity.

Stenke's family fled upon the evacuation of East Prussia in winter 1945, in the civil exodus along the Baltic Sea to Northern Germany, crossing over 1100 kilometres of land, never returning from thereon. There was no mentioning the war, about what it meant for the life of each member of the family: the artists only knew that they "fled during the war" and "came from the north". In order to facilitate a contemporary discourse on the past to understand the present, for the artists it became necessary to connect lapses and gaps, be they real or fictional. The process of recalling the unsaid, puzzling pieces together, digging dust away, imagining possible worlds whilst mapping impossible ones, opened closed boxes and questioned their insides: the dematerialisation of the past, where oblivion reigns above nostalgia.

Teetering between the real, the visionary, and the changing contours of the memories of many, the film features the artists in a sequence of moving images, examined through social and geophysical lenses. Their actions evolve in direct response to the surroundings and objects they found along their way. The camera records what possible spectators would view, yet the movie is not a documentary. Instead, the performances are pieced together organically, forming an autonomous story to be read by each viewer in a personal way.

  • VestAndPage
    Director
  • Verena Stenke
    Director
    sin∞fin
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Director
    sin∞fin
  • VestAndPage
    Writer
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Writer
    sin∞fin
  • VestAndPage
    Producer
  • Verena Stenke
    Producer
    sin∞fin
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Producer
    sin∞fin
  • VestAndPage
    Key Cast
  • Verena Stenke
    Key Cast
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Key Cast
  • Stephan Knies
    Key Cast
  • Vlada Smirnova
    Key Cast
  • Verena Stenke
    Cinematography
    sin∞fin
  • Andreas Bauer Kanabas
    Original Soundtrack
  • Katarina & Ljubica Duo
    Original Soundtrack
  • Josephine Macri
    Original Soundtrack
  • Mauro Sambo
    Original Soundtrack
  • Angie Seah
    Original Soundtrack
  • White Noise Generator
    Original Soundtrack
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Spitzwegerich
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Feature
  • Genres:
    History, War, Performance art, Experimental, True events, WWII
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 30 minutes 6 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 1, 2018
  • Production Budget:
    5,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    Germany, Poland, Russian Federation
  • Language:
    English, German
  • Shooting Format:
    HD digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Berlin Independent Film Festival
    Berlin
    Germany
    World Premiere
    Best No-Budget Feature Film Award
  • Strangelove Festival
    Folkestone
    United Kingdom
    Official Selection
  • Butohpolis Festival
    Warsaw
    Poland
    Official Selection
  • Performance Art Film @ MOCCA
    Belgrade
    Serbia
    Official Selection
  • Fuorinorma #4 La via neosperimentale del cinema italiano
    Rome
    Italy
    Official Selection
  • Temporary Contemporary
    Huddersfield
    United Kingdom
  • Film as Idea, Film as Film, Film as Art
    Warsaw
    Poland
    Official Selection
  • SPILL Festival of Performance
    Ipswich
    United Kingdom
    Official Selection
  • AVIFF Art Film Festival
    Cannes
    France
    Official Selection
  • CONTEXTS Festival of Ephemeral Art
    Sokolowsko
    Poland
    Official Selection
  • PixelsGARAGE Awards of Excellence

    Best Experimental Film Award
  • Fuorinorma #4 La via neosperimentale del cinema italiano
    Rome
    Italy
    January 18, 2022
    Official Selection
  • Boden Film Festival

    December 2021
    Finalist
Distribution Information
  • PAV Performance Art Video
    Distributor
    Country: Worldwide
    Rights: Video on Demand, Pay Per View
Director Biography - VestAndPage, Verena Stenke, Andrea Pagnes

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, are lecturers at the Master of Performance Practice in Arnhem (NL), as well as the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The urgency to undertake the month-long performance walk and the resulting film, Plantain, came about after the unexpected death of my father in 2011. I was left with boxes of yellowed photographs and personal annotations about the exodus of my family from East Prussia in 1945. Together with Andrea, we imagined bringing light to this story – all the while being aware that revisiting history through the recollections of the others can be fraught with mis-perceptions and misleading interpretations. However, personal life stories have the potential to be universal, and individual accounts are like atoms of a comprehensive whole partaking of historic context.

The lived experience is determinant to our artistic practice: being performance artists, we define the others, the world, and ourselves through our bodies. To realise the film, in May-June 2015, we walked the escape route that my family had forcibly undertaken 70 years before, retracing the journey in reverse from West to East. Along the way, we kept a diary of reflections on encountered people and places, the draft for the stream-of-consciousness dialogues of the film. We gathered original footage and performed site-responsive, location-specific enactments of true events of the exodus – our presence and actions at the service of the moving image.

The film collects splinters of memories in seven episodes linked by shifting contexts and the ephemeral appearances of a woman in white, a woman in black and one Everyman. Each episode is inspired by one of my ancestors.

Performance art is strictly linear in space and time, where – just as in life – the process reveals itself in the time passing. However, film can function as a kind of wormhole, where space-time deludes by effacing trivial boundaries, and where – just as in life – the process reveals itself by finding links between apparently disconnected actions. The combination of both art forms allow us to question our perception of reality, and how we process and store infor-mation in our minds, bodies and souls.

For us, Plantain is an opportunity to engage with the recent past while in the present, and interweave a necessary dialogue between generations and cultures. We reflect and interpret life, corporeal life, wishing to lift up and to heighten the faith in the human spirit.

The 20th century is marked by genocides, forced displacements and world wars. Today we’re witnessing global powers indifferent to human ideals. We have spent years and years thinking and saying the worst about ourselves, but history proves that, despite our imperfections, evil prevails only when we mistake it for the norm, and the human spirit is evidence of kindness and courage.

The stories we tell ourselves, whether false or true, are in the end real. Memory shapes these stories, and finally, a shape comes by that which looks different, as if to say that a new generation is the missing piece of the previous one, waiting in turn for the next one to come: a lasting continuity. We made of the search of memory the meaning itself, retracing a historic path. And rather than retracing, our action here is to restart.