The Community Whisperer: How Marinella Senatore Is Taking Social-Practice Art to New Heights

Marinella Senatore is full of energy. In a conversation over Skype, she speaks a mile a minute with righteous enthusiasm, full of joy and excitement. Her demeanor is friendly, sweet, and welcoming. Above all her spirit is contagious. You can’t help but be immediately taken by her kinetic vigor—and all this just from hearing her voice mediated via the Internet.

This, of course, comes as no surprise, for Senatore has made a career of doing just that: inspiring large groups of people with her moxie and drive to participate in her large-scale social engagements.

The artist, who is not very well known in the US, has for the better part of a decade traveled Europe and the rest of world working with small communities to create public performances, dance pieces, films, plays, and photographic projects.

Currently, she has a retrospective at the Queens Museum titled “Piazza Universale / Social Stages,” which showcases archival documentation from some of the artist’s projects since 2009 to the present. (It closes this weekend.)

Senatore shifted from working simply in collage and video to public art in 2006, and has been known to bring together very large groups of people (as many as 20,000) to collectively activate their creative abilities, often bringing participants from non-art backgrounds to create and be part of the artistic process.

Most recently, in 2016, the artist and more than 200 participants presented Modica Street Musical: The Present, the Past, and the Possible. The two-act performance that took place in the public plazas of the Sicilian town of Modica saw participants engage in dance, music, and acting to reflect on the culture and history of the site.

Additionally, for the opening of her retrospective at the Queens Museum, the artist presented a public performance titled Protest Forms: Memory and Celebration: Part II. The spectacle brought together 350 participants from a range of activist groups and cultural organizations throughout the city, including members of Black Lives Matter NYC and the Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps Symphonic Band. The performance was held as celebration of the civic engagements in New York City.

The impressive output of her work, the sheer size of her productions, and the artist’s ability to bring so many diverse groups together to work in harmony all amount to quite an amazing feat. The question is: How does Senatore do it? What is her secret?

Born in 1977 in the small Italian town of Cava dei Tirreni, Marinella was trained as classical violinist at a very young age and was encouraged to play professionally in an orchestra. To the dismay of her family, Senatore gave up her career as a classical musician and decided to become an artist instead.

But the experience of working in an ensemble seems to have never left her, and has become an integral part of her practice. “It’s a core structure,” is how she puts it.

“We are all telling the story, which is the script, and in the orchestra it is exactly the same,” she elaborates. “I play the violin, my sister plays the cello, but then at the end we are all playing the same sonata. At the end of the day we have one symphony to play for people. So we are all together with our individuality, but we are together in a collective environment.”

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Chris Alexakisart, women