This self-reflective article reveals how blood as a performative tool enhances intimacy and explores human fragility.
This self-reflective article addresses how VestAndPage (Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes) have been exploring blood in a bifold symbolic value as a performative tool since 2006: connection–separation, immutability–violation, abjection–access. After medical complications and becoming blood donors, the artist duo has started deploying surgical instruments in their performances to engrave Pagnes’s skin, extract his blood, and ritualise this process into stream-of-consciousness writing. Thus, blood becomes a device of intimacy that allows them to transcend the representation of concepts and explore the human condition’s transitory presence and fragile nature.
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Andrea Pagnes (2025) studied this question.
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