INSIDEART | ROME FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Multidisciplinary artist, Marinella Senatore has established herself internationally over the past ten years with her socially engaged projects and her practice focused on audience participation. Born in Cava de’ Tirreni in 1977, Senatore has a background in music, fine arts, and cinema. Through her participatory and relational art projects, the artist intertwines different disciplines, including visual arts, dance, and theater, giving new political meaning to collective formations and offering the public an opportunity to generate social change.

In her performance projects, the artist embraces the dimension of an ancestral ritual rather than traditional theater, involving ordinary people in activities such as dance, sports, and mindfulness, where, without a script, most actions are dictated by improvisation and guided by the energy of the audience. In 2012, Marinella Senatore founded the School of Narrative Dance (SOND), a nomadic, free, and non-hierarchical school that proposes an alternative educational system based on emancipation, empowerment, and self-education.

(Afterglow, Performance at Battersea Power Station, 2022)

Thanks to the diversity of techniques and languages she employs, Senatore is also well known for her luminous installations inspired by the festive lights of Southern Italy, on which she likes to write messages of activism. She also creates installations, paintings, pencil drawings, collages, and banners exhibited worldwide. The luminarie, in particular, have become a recurring element in her work due to their ability to catalyze energy: they are ephemeral architectures that create temporary spaces for rituals and social interaction.

For the artist, every gesture and artistic object is inherently political and possesses a transformative power that helps redefine space and the relationships between the communities that inhabit it, activating new dynamics. “Art,” Senatore explained in an interview for Inside Art, “is the remedy against despair, against social anger, and performance is the art of the here and now—it represents the present and the future. And the future is not resolved with objects but with experiences.”

(Dance First Think Later, 2022, Palais de Tokyo, Paris)

Among the institutions that have commissioned and exhibited her works are the Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Queens Museum and High Line in New York, and in Italy, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and MADRE in Naples.

(Make It Shine, 2021, London – Torino)

For the Jubilee 2025, Marinella Senatore was the first contemporary artist involved in the project curated by Cristiana Perrella, unveiled after the opening of the second Holy Door in Rebibbia prison. From December to February, she presented the installation “Io contengo moltitudini” (I Contain Multitudes), the result of a participatory process with the Roman prison community. The artwork reproduced a project previously presented in Naples at the Piazzale Diaz roundabout: a self-supporting vertical structure, approximately 6 meters high and 3 meters in diameter, composed of luminarie displaying phrases in various languages and dialects, selected from those written by male and female detainees during a workshop involving around 60 participants.

(We Rise By Lifting Others, 2020, site specific dimensions, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence)