Current Projects (2024-25)

CONSTELLATION

The proposal develops a touring model based on co-creation and sharing of performance practices, within which the partnership focuses on the body in relation to queer identity, displacement, ecology, and time.

The partnership understands co-creation as a place of magmatic creativity which is non-institutionalised, inspiring, and capable of developing collaborations based on inclusion and equality, and attracting new audiences. The project revolves around the need to respond with art to the current global state of emergency when it comes both to queer and feminist rights and to climate change. Fundamental to the project is founding its collaboration on artistic cooperation and community building.

In this sense, it rethinks the idea of touring by adapting the touring concept to the local topics and needs of each presenting context, learning from local art practitioners, sharing practices, and developing the final work through a co-creation process with the local community. The touring work will be different in each presentation, each time reflecting the specific reality and needs of the local context, raising awareness on the topics of queer identity, displacement, ecology, and climate change through the lens of the local perspective, and providing access to underrepresented stories.

Perform Europe Grant

EUR 60,000

Partners

PAV - Performance Art Video

Artistic Works

Queer deities in migration

Producers: Uta Bekaia and Dato Koridze in collaboration with Pari Banu Asgar

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Queer deities in migration, brings together performance artists in migration to reflect on the struggles faced by the LGBTQ+ community in the Caucasus region. Georgian artist duo Uta Bekaia and Dato Koridze, together with the curator Giorgi Rodionov, co-create a performance in each city with a queer artist who had to relocate from the Caucasus region to different cities in Europe due to issues related to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The project establishes links between their personal histories and the characteristics and similarities of corresponding deities, researching the mythology of the Caucasus region: it involves the creation of distinct costumes, makeup, and masks symbolising the historical narratives of the queer individuals.

Abandonment

Producers: Ostap Manulyak, Yaryna Shumska, Mykhailo Barabash

The work is centred on the theme of savagery and morbidity of the territory, soil and nature as a result of danger created and fueled by humans, sparking reflection on how nature experiences the war mutely yet not in silence.

In the context of the continuous war that has been going on for 10 years in Ukraine, the changes are not observed from a distance or with aloofness but rather are examined closely. The local context is a kind of ‘macro shooting’ because of the everyday changes that the nature around us undergoes, which each person experiences directly.

In the global context, humans are trying to return to the original nature, which has not undergone human ‘cultivation’. At the same time, the abandonment of fields, gardens, villages, and towns has become a sign of an endangered territory that is experiencing permanent pain.

Living through destruction, and demolition, the understanding of the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘wildness’ changes. From the imaginative and abstract, these concepts are projected onto the objects and routes of our everyday life. Close up, everything looks different. But are we able to transform from observers into participants?

STRATA

Producers: VESTANDPAGE

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STRATA is a performance art work of philosophical, poetic action. 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 sites where the oldest known examples of human figurative artworks can be found, VestAndPage convenes in an interdisciplinary gathering of contemporary artists and scientists to challenge central existential and social issues. The caves are the symbiotic realms in which the dance between embodiment and scrutiny, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed, occurs.

Coming together to look into the river of human civilization and to share what they have found, the artists irradiate concepts of time, ecological intelligence and politics through performances for the camera. 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.

48hrs experience

Producers: Lisa Hoffmann, Charles Washington, Alba T Álvarez

Over the past five years, the artist collective has conducted extensive research on post-capitalist visions. They developed an audience engagement model, inviting the public to a 48-hour experience exploring the relationship between capitalism, body perception, and communal living.

The experience includes somatic workshops, collective cooking, habitat making, techno character dances, and rebirths, focusing on activation, participation, and movement.

The goal of the process is to reimagine theatre and performance through a lens of sustainability. This sustainable practice seeks to fuse social and performative elements, addressing topics like class, exploitation, care, creativity, and community.