Marinella Senatore was born in Cava de’ Tirreni in 1977. She held lectures on audio-visual language at Universidad Complutense and at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Madrid. Her artistic exploration entails the active participation of the audience during the creative process by relying on diverse media, from installation to video, drawing, performance. In 2013, Senatore founded The School of Narrative Dance, a traveling and entirely free of charge school of storytelling. Her work has been exhibited extensively in Italy and abroad. She participated in several art events, including the 54th Venice Art Biennale; the Gothenburg Biennial, Sweden; the 30th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts; the 4th Athens Biennale. In 2013, she was granted the Scholarship for Young Italian Artists awarded by the Castello di Rivoli-Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. In 2014, she was shortlisted for the MAXXI Awards.

– title: Speak easy

– date: 2009

– medium: video

– size: 15′ 30”

– description: The video entitled Speak easy was donated by Marinella Senatore concomitantly with the workshop-exhibition entitled NARRAZIONE E CONVENIENZE DEL VIDEO. Nella situazione io mi trovo proveniente da un passato e proiettato in un futuro, curated by Fiammetta Strigoli and held at Casa Masaccio in 2010, to which Senatore collaborated as an artist-tutor. The video was produced by over 1,200 people from Madrid who contributed to the project through a fundraising campaign based on microcredit, which was advanced as a socially accountable economic financing for cultural production. This financing method forwarded by Senatore turned the art system completely upside down, bypassing the standard vision of the artist as an art generator and of the audience as a receiver of art, and creating a repository of stories to be shared. The video stages a complex plot, masterfully edited by the artist who manages to blend cinematography, photography, and music; the latter being the key element of the narrative. Speak easy is a musical set in the United States of the 1950s, in which music is used by the artist as the key element to connect a great number of participants.