Marinella Senatore

Participation.
Through participatory art practice I’m questioning the bio-politics of different communities and circumvent the traditional roles of artist and audience, extending the idea of ‘assembly’ and “community”.
Directions.
My effort is not to be the good director but rather to understand how to enable the more effective withdrawal of it.
Street.
Engaging with ecology of affiliation, affection, empowerment, and belonging, I articulate my long- term interest in the street as a social platform, articulating ideas of emancipation and common good. It’s everything about energy.
But also caring.

Needs and desires are allowed.
And I don’t understand why such instances shouldn’t be addressed in a creative project, which is in fact a safety place, suitable for reconsidering roles, failures and structures.
Awareness.
The development of an awareness is possible and yet to come.
Mobilization.
A mobilization of individuals can be a result of such awareness.
Movement.
Questioning the structures that govern the way we experience movement.
A new mindful– cultural and physical motion– across a city can construct different audience.

Marinella Senatore

Marinella Senatore
(Cava dei Tirreni, 1977)

Marinella Senatore has been carrying out public participation projects since 2006, involving entire communities in the creation of collective works. Her artistic practice is inclusive and relational and her works are manifestos of militancy and resistance in which she makes political protest coexist with theater, music and cinema.

Her performances, paintings, collages, installations, videos and photographs focus on social and urban issues such as emancipation, empowerment, equality, aggregation systems and working conditions.

One of the distinctive features of her work are the monumental installations made with lights,luminarie, decorations taking their name from the Latin lumen per aeria (lights in the air) because they were originally made with oil lamps hung on wooden structures, thus giving the impression of being suspended in the void.

While inspired by that type of culture, Marinella Senatore completely subverts the meaning of the operation, transforming the luminaria from a pure ephemeral element of celebration, into an instrument of aggregation with a profound political meaning.

With her horizontal and participatory artistic practice, she redefines her own role as an artist, as an activator of processes, thus rethinking the public not as an audience of spectators but as a multiplicity of creative subjects.

Resetting the power relationship between creator and user is one of the cornerstones on which the School of Narrative Dance, founded by Marinella Senatore in 2013, is based, focusing on the idea that storytelling is an experience that can be investigated choreographically, through a teaching without hierarchies, with the intention of creating real communities using a totally free and not schematized teaching method.

The school, which is nomadic and free, changes according to the spaces it temporarily occupies, proposing an alternative educational system based on emancipation, inclusion and self-training.