sin∞fin #2 – Performances at the Holy Centre
In the second episode of the "sin∞fin" trilogy, the two characters move through the lanes of an imaginary, oneiric city, encountering visions and memories of excess and absence, loss and overflow, surrender and hope. In the quest for their personal definition of the holy centre, they are confronted with prosaic realities. It is as if there was neither inside nor outside, but only textures and edges. Their acts are centrifugal, remembrances splint all over the ground, waiting to be picked up after having travelled so far. They circulate and watch at themselves as strangers drawn to stop by, in the process of adding their stories to others. Meanings and signs, layered over ruins and the dust of history, are peeled off to be set forth in a map of fragmented time.
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VestAndPageDirector
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Verena StenkeDirector
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Andrea PagnesDirector
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VestAndPageWriter
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Andrea PagnesWriter
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VestAndPageProducer
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Verena StenkeProducer
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Andrea PagnesProducer
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VestAndPageKey Cast
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Verena StenkeKey Cast
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Andrea PagnesKey Cast
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Verena StenkeCinematography
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Project Type:Documentary, Experimental, Feature
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Genres:Experimental, Performance art, Environment, Ecology, Religion, Philosophy, Society, Travel, Culture, Art, Politics
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Runtime:37 minutes 14 seconds
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Completion Date:May 5, 2011
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Country of Origin:Germany
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Country of Filming:India
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Language:English, Hindi
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Shooting Format:HD digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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CCCD Centre for Community Cultural DevelopmentHong Kong
Hong Kong -
Fundacion Alumnos47 @ Cine TonaláMexico City
Mexico
Distribution Information
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PAV Performance Art VideoDistributorCountry: WorldwideRights: Video on Demand, Pay Per View
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.
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.