UK Premiere of the performance monologue as part of the ongoing cycle "HOME" by VestAndPage

Documentation coming soon

While many in Europe consider it to belong since eradicated, it still presents one of the deadliest pandemics worldwide. In the Romantic period, it was the epitome of muse and poetry and a popular motif in painting, literature and music. As the "firstborn of the mother of pestilence and disease," it has accompanied the primate human through the eras since time immemorial. Today it is a curable disease, yet more than one million people worldwide fall victim to it every year. Its social perception has changed fundamentally throughout the epochs: from the glorified malaise of the romantic Bohemian poets through the painful proletarian death during the industrial revolution to the antisocial illness of the lepers during National Socialism. Today it is considered the disease of the marginalized, the dependent and the destitute, hardly noticed by the common public. The talk is about tuberculosis. The personal experience of being as a body home to pathogens flows into "1 9 Monologue", an autobiographical performance text, while building a bridge between precise self-observation and a global, historical and literary outside.

Consumption remains a 'social disease'. It has become a 'disease of the marginalized'. It makes it rather unlikely that consumption will once again become a literary or artistic subject. – Ulrike Moser, "Schwindsucht - Eine andere deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte"

Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

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 for their collective performance operas and temporary artistic community projects. VestAndPage explore performance art and film as phenomena through their collaborative creative practice, theoretical, artistic research and curation. Their works – a celebration of life – have been presented in museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas, and various sites worldwide. Their writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. They are currently presenting the cycle of live collective performances "HOME" and producing "STRATA", a performance-based film on Deep time, as well as "momentum", a series of videos in which they host conversations under existential focus. VestAndPage's art practice is contextual and situation-responsive, conceived psycho-geographically in response to social contexts, natural surroundings, historical sites and architectures. In their works, they move between the unseen and the unforeseen, the unsaid, the forgotten and the repressed. In their poetics of relations, they move in an encounter with the other, examining threshold stages characterized by instability and a confrontation with identity, the writing of history, 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 the 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, questioning the perception of reality and how we process and store information. For VestAndPage, a film can delude space-time, open the unconscious as a creative vessel, and reveal processes and relations by linking what appears disconnected persons, things and happenings. 

www.vest-and-page.de