Description
“They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.” — Verena Stenke.
Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes—who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.
“Andrea’s thought chronicles and dialogues with friends delve into the intricacies and diverse experiences of displacement, cultural questioning, and tradition. They wave from presence to absence, ponder what it means to be alive, move fluidly between performance and introspection, and populate the metaphysical space this book represents, crafting a love letter to those who dwell between corporeal and spiritual conditions.”
— Chinasa Vivian Ezugha.
“Very glad to hear about these Notes! That was good!”
— Timothy Morton.
“It is stunning, it is epic, it is powerful and profound, it is a wonderful thing – thank you so much – for this, for everything”
—Lois Keidan
Andrea Pagnes
Artist and writer
Andrea Pagnes has worked with Verena Stenke as VestAndPage since 2006 in performance art, performance-based filmmaking, curation, publishing and temporary artistic community projects. A recipient of the Robert Schuman Silver Medal for European Unity, his roots are in philosophy, political science, conceptual art and applied drama. He explores performance art as a phenomenon within collaborative practice and research. With a poetic approach to the human body as an experiential device for artistic creation, VestAndPage’s “Poetics of Relations” focuses on the idea of thin places where the visible and the invisible entwine. Notions of coexistence, perception, memory strata, temporalities, pain sublimation, endurance, union, trust in change, risk-taking, communication and frailty of the individual and the collective within social and environmental spheres merge in their works. Animated by a nomadic, confrontative spirit, they often conceived their performances psychoterratically in response to social contexts, natural and urban surroundings, historical sites, ruins and architecture. Pagnes and Stenke are the founders and curators of the Venice International Performance Art Week, Best Film Award recipients at the Berlin Independent Film Festival, and lecturers at ArtEZ University of the Arts and UNIDEE Academy. Their latest feature film, “STRATA”, examines Deep Time, merging the human body with the geological depth of subsurface environments.
A project by VestAndPage press
Published by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), 2024
Paperback, 175 x 215 mm, 451 pages with black & white images throughout
ISBN: 978-1-8380229-7-6
Trade orders: see our Distribution page for more information
Student offer: We offer five books to five students, for £5 each. Claim by emailing us at [email protected]
