Marinella Senatore

Transforming the hustle and bustle of Graz’s station square, Marinella Senatore’s luminary installation provides a portal to the festival and its themes.

Marinella Senatore is known not only for the parades and collective choreographies of her School of Narrative Dance, but also for a special kind of installation fruitfully mixing art with fashion and urban design. Working with southern Italian craftspeople, she creates a new form of the traditional art of luminarie, a specific form of gloriously detailed light display, more intense than Christmas lights, used to transform towns during local holidays, religious festivals, and community celebrations.

Senatore reinvents the baroque lightbulb ornaments of the traditional luminarie and the ethereal architectural space they create, adding sentences and quotes, political and poetic slogans gathered in readings and on the streets—from people, from riots, strikes, or other street gatherings. These are poetic statements that could speak to everybody, enabling people to join each other and a possible community of the future, and hoping to inspire the search for a way out of the present predicament, both for the art world and society at large.

Bio
Marinella Senatore (1977, Cava deʼ Tirreni, Italy) is an artist whose practice is characterized by public participation. Her work merges forms of protest, street theater, storytelling, protest dance, and public ceremonies, reflecting upon their political nature and often involving large groups of people. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Italy and abroad, including: Bienal de São Paulo (2020); High Line, New York (2018, 2015); Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018); MAXXI, Rome (2018, 2014); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); Kunsthaus Zürich (2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015); Biennale de Lyon (2015); Thessaloniki Biennale (2015); Bienal de Cuenca (2014); Castello di Rivoli (2014); Liverpool Biennial (2014); Athens Biennale (2013); Havana Biennale (2012); Göteborg Biennial (2013); 54th Venice Biennale ILLUMinations (2011); and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (2008).