Strata (2022)

"STRATA" is the fifth hybrid of performance art and film by artist duo VestAndPage. A film 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 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.