VestAndPage Reflect on Performance, Landscape, and Change in Svalbard

Still from Hast du Kohle?, Performance for video at Taubanesentrale, 2025 © VestAndPage.

Artist duo VestAndPage have contributed a new entry to Artica Svalbard’s Field Notes, reflecting on their recent residency in Longyearbyen. Their text, drawn from the broader project A Desert of North, examines how performance can engage with environmental transformation, uncertainty, and embodied experience in the Arctic.

Through parallel reflections, Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes consider the physical and emotional impact of Svalbard’s rapidly changing landscape. From thawing permafrost to the symbolic closure of the coal mines, their writing explores the porous boundary between body and environment, presence and disquiet.

The piece also introduces their concept of “the porous tense”—a framework for understanding performance in relation to melt, unfixing, and geological time. This material will be expanded in THE POROUS TENSE: A Logbook on the Meaning of Performing Melt and the Poetics of Unfixing, to be published in autumn 2025, more details coming soon.

Read their full Field Notes contribution here.