SIGNUM

A performance-based short film to inquire through bodily actions the creation and function of visible and invisible signs in response to the geologic— ephemeral traces organically formed by earth's geological strata and visualised by horizontal, vertical, diagonal or sinusoidal lines. A quest for factual and imaginary signs – words and poetry to be revealed, composed and transcoded by the same geological strata from which they emerge and disintegrate once they come into touch with their mutable substance, the natural elements. Here both nature and human reasoning serve as a home, labour, or border and frontier. The artists' temporary presence is marked by the diagnostic features of sedimentary rocks, porous caves, and stratified layers that reshape the landscape. They wander in search of expressions and languages to speak, envisioning connections to be made beyond what words can name.

  • VestAndPage
    Director
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • Verena Stenke
    Director
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Director
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • VestAndPage
    Writer
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Writer
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • VestAndPage
    Producer
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • Verena Stenke
    Producer
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Producer
    Plantain, sin∞fin
  • VestAndPage
    Key Cast
  • Verena Stenke
    Key Cast
  • Andrea Pagnes
    Key Cast
  • Guillermo Gómez-Peña
    Key Cast
  • Balitronica Gómez
    Key Cast
  • Francesca Carol Rolla
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Feature
  • Genres:
    Philosophy, Documentary, Experimental, Performance art, Travel, Environment, Nature, Ecology
  • Runtime:
    33 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    October 18, 2018
  • Production Budget:
    2,500 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    Spain
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    HD digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Formentera Film Festival
    Formentera
    Spain
    Official Selection "EXTRAFEST"
  • Residents of the Port City
    Taipei
  • Videobardo
    Buenos Aires
  • How to survive the Apocalypse
    New York
    United States
  • LATITUDES HYBIDAS
    Santa Cruz de la Sierra
    Bolivia, Plurinational State of
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.

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Director Statement

VestAndPage's art practice is contextual and situation-responsive, conceived psycho-geographically in response to natural surroundings, social contexts, historical sites and architectures. They usually work in 'thin places, in which the borders between spaces and times are the most fragile – liminal spaces in which the worlds come closest. In their works, they move between the unseen and the unforeseen, the unsaid, the forgotten and the repressed. They inquire about performance art as an urgency to explore the physical, mental and spiritual bodies, where moments of crisis often see the crossing of boundaries by the break with norms and presumed orders, to interface with the ephemeral matter of art and existence. In an ongoing "Poetics of Relations," they move in an encounter with the other. They examine threshold stages characterised by instability and a confrontation with time, memory, communication and the fragility of the individual and the collective within social and environmental spheres. In an artistic journey from the inner onto the outside, the spiritual onto the physical, and the invisible onto the visible, they apply trust in change, endurance, union, pain sublimation and risk-taking with a poetic bodily approach to art practice and a focus on universal human experiences. They are devoted to a poetic approach in experimental, personal filmmaking based on performance art in extreme natural and urban environments, questioning the perception of reality and relationship, 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.