PROCESSION

2017

Marinella Senatore’s artistic practice is generally characterized by strong public participation. With her performances, she creates the means to foster the creative power of a crowd and initiating a dialogue between history, culture and social structures. Her work aims to be experienced by everyone, inviting us to create a participative work in which everybody can play a role and where the role of the artist as author and public as the recipient can be rewritten. Senatore uses a wide range of mediums, from video, drawing, performance, installation, photography, sound, painting and collage to sculpture.

By creating new possibilities for public involvement, the local communities are involved in different ways: residents share their skills and expertise or achieve new ones, negotiating with the artist to determine the part each person would play in the project. The projects sometimes encompass workshop where the participants take on the roles of non-professional scriptwriters, costume designers, camera operators, set designers, dancers etc.

The idea of Procession, – the title of our exhibition -, is linked to the artist practice of performance. Processional performances provide a framework for a collective celebration and reflection on community and creation. They are inspired by public ceremonies, civil and religious rituals as well as festivals and mass events, interweaving this intangible heritage with the format of the street musical.

Engaging with the poetics of urban space and the experience of everyday city life it also ponders the importance of cultural communities amidst new urban developments and tests the conditions for the formation of new constituencies that strive to harness the emancipatory power of communal creative processes. From cinema to theatre, passing through choreography and music, – in order to reflect on the political nature of collective formations and on their impact on the social history of places and communities -, Senatore’s processions are focused on systems of aggregation, social structures and forms of protest by oppressed minorities, to merge with the repertoires of bands, groups and other collective creations troupes composed by diverse generations.

At the show, the static nature of the bi-dimensional works presented by the artist is balanced by the compositions that address to action. Ideals of feminism, workers’ rights or universal rights to education and emancipation, are represented throughout the canvases, either by political slogans, songs of resistance or body action at demonstrations.