As a transdisciplinary artist, curator, and researcher of performance practices, I am interested in interdisciplinary processes that inquire about the relationship between bodies and sites, and how embodied, phenomenological, and speculative arts-based research methods can be relevant to these. My work explores questions such as: Why is a body in a site in the first place? What is the relationship between bodies and sites – what does a body do to the site, and the site to a body?
I have been working internationally since 2006 as VestAndPage, utilising performance art and moving images for ephemeral and immaterial works centred around the embodiment of critical sites. Epistemically, my research engages with knowledge-making in action, where the body in critical sites informs the mind to reach alternative perspectives. I have created site-responsive art in collaboration with polar, subterranean, volcanic, military, clinical, megalopolitan, and other critical milieus.
My polar work includes the performance-based art film “sin∞fin” (2012), produced in artist-in-residency with the Argentine National Antarctic Direction (DNA) at the Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland Islands, and a recent research residency at ARTICA in Longyearbyen, Svalbard and Jan Mayen (2025) with an inquiry into the intersections of body and site. The polar regions as “critical sites” are fascinating to me because of their ecological and geopolitical relevance as increasingly unstable grounds, which I am interested in from social, anthropological, environmental, and biological perspectives. I also draw inspiriation on two concepts from the humanities: transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2017) and psychoterratic states (Albrecht, 2019). The first frames bodies as enmeshed with environmental and biological forces, and the second stands for the psychological impacts of ecological distress.
My arts-based research is featured in various publications, including Performing Landscapes – Performing Ice (2020), Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication (2024), and Provocations on Home, Place and Belonging Through Arts-Based Research (Routledge, upcoming). I co-authored essays published in Undercurrents Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, Performance Research, Performance Matters, and Journal of Embodied Research. I am a member of the AHCR research network Rock/Body: Performative Interfaces between the Geologic and the Body, University of Exeter, and a partner in the PEEK research project Shaken Grounds: Seismography of Precarious Presences, University of Applied Arts Vienna. I am a lecturer and mentor for Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of Arts (Netherlands) and Accademia UNIDEE (Italy), and I have been a visiting artist and researcher at various universities.
I look forward to being in touch about interdisciplinary projects that include phenomenological and embodied processes of critical bodies and sites in polar regions!
Contact details:
Email: verena@vest-and-page.de
Website: www.vest-and-page.de
LinkedIn / Facebook / Instagram
Select Publications:
Pagnes Andrea, Stenke Verena (2013) Antarctic Dream – Ice as architecture of the human spirit: VestAndPage performative works in Antarctica. Performance Research, 18(6). 71–80.
Stenke Verena and Pagnes Andrea (2025) STRATA – A performance-based film on deep time in the body and the geologic. UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, 10. 45–71.
Tait Peta (2024) Icy Love: Performing affect and emotion feeling about climate change. In A. Hemkendreis and AS. Jürgens (eds) Communicating Ice through Popular Art and Aesthetics (Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 165–166.
Quin, D. (2020). Figures in a Landscape. In Philpott, C., Leane, E. and Delbridge, M. (eds.) Performing Landscapes – Performing Ice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 55-86. ISBN 978-3-030-47388-4.
Women in the Arctic and Antarctic 