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Thirteen years have passed since that vehicle with a megaphone passed through the streets of Enna recruiting “non-professional actors and extras of all ages” for a short film by Marinella Senatore. Summoned for a popular casting session at the Teatro Garibaldi, the citizens of the Sicilian town were called upon to collaborate in the writing and interpretation of a story centred on the local community of miners. The result, Nui Simu (2010), sought a direct contact with the protagonists of that story. They were interpellated not only as witnesses but also as bearers of an “auto-narrative” process that originated from the public space itself; a site of coagulation of energies and individual stories to be brought together in a collective tale.
Senatore had already anticipated this participatory working method in All the Things I Need (2006) — a musical at the Galleria Civica in Trento for which the artist built a set inside the museum, calling on non-professional actors to participate. She then definitively introduced it in Manuale per i viaggiatori (2007), produced in Naples for the Project Room of the Madre Museum, and Speak Easy (2009), filmed in Madrid and accompanied by a crowdfunding campaign with the participation of 1,200 citizens in the work’s production. After Nui Simu, this approach found further developments with the realisation of Variations in New York (2011) and Rosas (2012), an opera in three acts in Berlin, Derby and Madrid. Many of these works immediately had a major international resonance: 2011’s Estman Radio Drama, involving the inhabitants of Porto Marghera by promoting meetings and debates on topics related to the territory and inspired by the documents preserved in the Augusto Finzi workers’ archive in Marghera’s Centro di Documentazione di Storia Locale, was presented at the 54th Venice Biennale curated by Bice Curiger.
With her origins in Campania, Marinella Senatore knows perfectly well what it means to inhabit the street, a place where unexpected things happen, unexpected encounters are made, and the private dissolves into the public dimension. From the street, the artist translates precise communicative strategies: the megaphone, leaflets, and word of mouth are the tools that, as a first step, allow her to interact with very different communities, harking back to the cinema and the travelling theatre that reached their highest expression precisely in the streets. If her interest in filmmaking was the first building block of her multidisciplinary training, it was then dance that acted as the glue in The School of Narrative Dance. Some of the premises of this long-term project can be detected even before its first creation in 2013, in the first procession organised in Berlin upon the solo exhibition at the Peres Project gallery the previous year.
Dance as a common, transversal language becomes the tool for establishing an alternative education system, which makes use of a non-hierarchical structure based on the exchange among peers. Following the logic of “anyone can be a teacher or a pupil”, a horizontal circulation of knowledge is encouraged, the results of which are manifested in increasingly complex actions that recall festive village celebrations, such as Modica Street Musical (2016) involving over two hundred inhabitants of the Sicilian town, and Palermo Procession (2018), realised on the occasion of Manifesta 12. In these works, the street is both the starting and the end point: it is, in fact, the very idea of learning, based on direct observation and the exchange of skills, that traces what happens in public space, a space understood as a place of aggregation and sociality, but also of pedagogical action. The result of a negotiation process between single individualities, aimed at constructing a more articulated narrative, the large parades that take place in the streets — with their ballet dancers, majorettes and marching bands — become osmotic spaces in which those who realise the work mingle with those who enjoy it. Compared to the earlier works, the amateurism of the extras leaves room for a more recognisable professionalisation of the figures involved, together with an overwhelming and in some ways stunning spectacularisation, in line with the image of an alley where, in joyful exultation, voices overlap to the point of becoming unrecognisable.
However, in Senatore’s work, it is not only the language of performance that embraces the street. Since 2016, the artist has been making increasingly elaborate luminarie that, drawing on the Baroque-origin scenic apparatuses still used for town and patronal festivals in southern Italy, bear quotations and messages that invite awareness, particularly regarding the position of women. Already exhibited in Modica in 2016, these illuminations reached a large scale on the High Line in New York (2018) and then, in Lecce, the Dior Cruise 2021 in 2020. “Luminarie … are like ethereal architectural structures that can build the idea of a plaza even when this plaza doesn’t exist. They can create environments for people to gather, exchange, meet, etc,” Senatore specifies.[1] Much like the richly embroidered velvet banners of the Protest Form: Memory and Celebration series (2019-2020), the luminarie are also objects “extracted” from the street, invested with slogans and returned to the street itself (but also to galleries and museums), in a process of transposition of signs that leads to a crossover between protest demonstrations and glittering fashion catwalks. Not the street then, but the streets, with their contradictions, banners, decorations and the lives of those who inhabit them, actors and extras in a plural narrative.
[1] M. Senatore, in E. Harle, “Marinella Senatore Building a Bright Community with Dior”, in Metal Magazine, n.d., https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/marinella-senatore (last accessed 15 June 2023).
