MARINELLA SENATORE

Marinella Senatore’s work in video, installation, performance, sound and drawing is rooted in public participation. The aim is to foster the creative power of groups of people, initiating a dialogue between history, culture and social structures. Her art is a form of communal engagement and her artistic practice is distinctive in its democratic engagement of large and diverse groups of people. She involves entire communities in the process and unleashes the creative capacities of people by boosting dialogues
with a focus on narration, using different modes of expression such as dance, film, performance, poetry, literature and handicraft, all based on and rooted in local history and culture. Anyone can participate in, experience, and play a role in these activities. These collaborative processes aim at emancipation and involvement, the fostering of
literacy and education and the exchange of skills.
Senatore is not only concerned with triggering social processes but also with questioning concepts such as sense of community and social responsibility, finding new narrative forms and ultimately in generating a collective memory through joint action.
Movie Set (2012) is an actual movie production set with a camera, sound, lighting, mirrors, dance bars, and smoke machines, where films, videos, and photographs can be made, or where theatrical performances can be staged with the possibility to capture them on film. Movie Set was born as part of Rosas –an opera for the screen in 3 Acts– where Senatore collaborated in 3 different cities with local free press, radios and associations to reach out schools, actors, dancers (professionals and amateurs) as well as hundreds of groups and individuals from
retired transportation workers, illiterate people, students, gender activists, community choirs, who participated in writing the original Libretto as well as in directing the final film work. Participants in Great
Britain, including local organizations, individuals, amateur theater groups, activists, filmmakers, associations, students, teachers, and artists, initially used Movie Set. Now an autonomous work, Movie
Set still functions as an actual production set, which is placed at the disposal of visitors to the exhibition, who may book to use it. The installation is an open platform, within which the artist’s role is to offer a
platform for people to express their own individual creativity or performativity, socialize, have fun, and perhaps realise a cherished dream or narrate a personal story.