Performance-based Filmmaking II- 
The Nature of the Political Image in Motion and its Performativity

                                                                                                                                                            with VestAndPage 

Cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs. — Werner Herzog

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. – Antonio Gramsci

Inhale: The whole earth groans. Exhale: Art is resistance. – Cole Arthur Riley

Let us use the camera not as a neutral witness but as a political body. Let us shape moving images that emerge from within and through us, images that enter into friction with the world. The political image is not what is shown — it is what is made to tremble. – VestAndPage
 

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
This intensive workshop focuses on the conceptual, ethical, aesthetic, and practical dimensions of performance-based filmmaking as a poetic and political practice. The course unfolds at the intersection of body-based performance art and filmmaking, treating the camera as a political agent, a witness, an accomplice, and a site of struggle.
Building upon VestAndPage’s long-term embodied research and their relational notion of the “poetics of relations,” the workshop reframes the moving image as a field of political tension, where personal urgencies, lived experience, memory, vulnerability, and structural power relations haunt, manifest or collide. Participants are invited to explore how performance-for-camera can function as a counter-narrative to dominant visual regimes and narratives, how bodies negotiate visibility and invisibility, and how images can enact resistance.

The course addresses urgent questions:
-    How does a political image emerge from embodied processes rather than from illustration?
-    How can performance-based film respond to local and global crises without aestheticising struggles and suffering?
-    Which private or public sites are relevant to political discourses?
-    How do we position bodies, voices, and gazes towards power structures such as colonialism, extractivism, surveillance, or technological control?
-    How can performance-based filmmaking operate as a situated, ethical, and insurgent practice?
-    
Rather than teaching technical filmmaking skills, the workshop focuses on methodological and performative strategies of working with the camera as a collaborator:
-    Difference between video documentation, performance-for-camera, and performance-based film;
-    The body as primary matter and political archive;
-    Revealing political urgencies, relations, and positionings;
-    Scouting locations by reading power relations embedded in public space;
-    Sustainability, ecological intelligence, and responsibility toward sites and communities;
-    Performing for the camera in conditions of resistance, risk, or exposure;
-    Spoken word, sound, breath, silence, and noise as political forces;
-    Non-linear narratives as counter-histories;
-    Production and post-production as ethical decision-making;
-    Guerrilla tactics vs. institutional frameworks.

Theoretical components include the analysis of key performance-based films and performative moving-image practices that have shaped political filmmaking, including distinctions between documentation and intervention, the politics of visibility, the body in relation to technological apparatuses, site-specific action, and the ethics of representation.

Practical assignments invite participants to create short performance-based video works as acts of situated political inquiry. These are conceived as seeds for future films and as embodied propositions that address personal urgencies within broader systemic conditions. The course culminates in a collective presentation of the produced video works, framed as a temporary assembly of political images rather than a finished exhibition, with a selection of which is included in the digital platform PAV Performance Art Video.

PREREQUISITES
No prior experience is needed.
The course will not provide foundational information on performance art; a minimum level of knowledge is assumed.
 

Program

 

About VestAndPage
 

This workshop is co-facilitated by VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes), artist duo and producers of five awarded performance-based films, founders and curators of the Venice International Performance Art Week; lecturers at Master of Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts, and MA Performance of the Norwegian Theater Academy. To learn more about VestAndPage's works and background visit their website

To enroll please send an email to: info@ecc-performanceart.eu