Marinella Senatore

2010-2011

Marinella Senatore is a film director and director of photography who also works with drawing, painting and installation. She holds a degree from Rome's Centre for Experimental Cinematography and teaches video and photography at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the University Complutense of Madrid.

Her films, photographs and installations demonstrate her interest in the arrangement of light on the set. This interest has also inspired sculptural installations (Memeland, 2005) and photographic series (Places, 2005). In recent years, Senatore has been working with storytelling as a means to involve the public in the making of artworks. In such projects, which take the form of collaborative films (such as How do U kill the Chemist,2009; Manuale per Viaggiatori, 2007; Horizontes de Sucesos, 2007; and All the things I need, 2006) she uses music as a place of exchange, where the viewer becomes participant, and the hierarchy between the artist as author and the public as recipient can be questioned and rewritten. 

In other pieces the public has been involved as producer of public projects, though a microcredit system that aims at creating an alternative and socially responsible economy for cultural production. The artist takes the role of facilitator, or mediator. Along the way, this collective dimension has gradually expanded to involve students, women's communities, business associations and groups of craftspeople in stage design, set building and technical aspects, touching the very core of production. With a contribution of one or two Euros each, her most recent videos were entirely produced by thousands of people (1,200 citizens of Madrid produced the musical Speak Easy in 2009), in a choral enthusiasm founded on effective micro-relationality. 

Her work fosters the construction of an archive of shared narratives that create a sense of community. Her subjects and plots are narrative occasions for complex audiovisual machines where light plays its demiurgic role, music acts as emotional catalyst, and photography carries out its governing function between the poles of reality and fiction, between the truth of the streets and the phantasmagoria of invention.