Glej,
Strata

About

STRATA is the fifth hybrid of performance art and film by artist duo VestAndPage. It is a film of philosophical, poetic action shot in 2021, to be released in 2024. STRATA explores caves as proto-spaces for altered states and sites of knowledge-making and human becoming. It takes place in prehistoric Swabian Jura caves used by Ice Age humans for shelter about 33,000 to 43,000 years ago. At these finding sites of the oldest known examples of human figurative artworks, VestAndPage convene in an interdisciplinary gathering of contemporary artists and scientists to challenge central existential and social issues. The caves are the symbiotic realms to dance between embodiment and scrutiny, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed.

Coming together to look into the river of human civilization and to share what they had found, the artists irradiate concepts of time, ecological intelligence, and politics through performances for the camera. The film pinholes a perspective on a world where art, science and multiple voices and perspectives nourish each other in co-creative processes. Nestled inside the dark subsurfaces of the land, the artists confront romantically distorted images of nature and naturalness to dismantle consolidated narratives and aesthetics. The human body and stratified societies are tied in continuity to the geological, beheld through a lens of queer ecology.

About VestAndPage

Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working together as VestAndPage internationally in performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing, and temporary artistic community projects.

Since 2010, they have been devoted to experimental performance-based filmmaking, producing four feature-length films, a silent film, a trilogy of shorts, and numerous other shorts, art videos and interview series. In 2020, they published their manifesto on performance-based filmmaking: “Poetics of Relations.”

They are the founders and directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week, and their poetic writings and research articles have been extensively published and translated for international readers. They share their methodology on performance-based filmmaking and collaborative performance and in masterclasses at art academies worldwide.