MARINELLA SENATORE
A SALIRE A LE STELLE / TO CLIMB TO THE STARS
A SALIRE A LE STELLE / TO CLIMB TO THE STARS
Pistoia, Palazzo Fabroni Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo
May 27 – September 5, 2021
Exhibition views: © Serge Domingie. Courtesy Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia
With the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation-Directorate General for the Promotion of the Country System and the Ministry of Culture-Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity
Curated by Ilaria Bernardi
Marinella Senatore (Cava de’ Tirreni, 1977) exhibits the new site-specific installation A salire a le stelle / To Climb To The Stars (2021), winner of the Dante Section of the public notice Cantica21 Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation-Directorate General for the Promotion of the Country System and the Ministry of Culture-Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity.
The installation draws inspiration from Cantos XXIV and XXV of the Inferno, which tell of Vanni Fucci, a Black Guelph originally from Pistoia, considered the gloomiest character in the entire canticle, condemned to the thieves’ bedlam because he was the author of the sacrilegious theft of the treasure of San Jacopo safeguarded in Pistoia Cathedral. For this reason, Marinella Senatore chose to participate in Cantica21 in collaboration with Pistoia’s Palazzo Fabroni. In fact, the exhibition is not only part of the celebrations dedicated to the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, but also of the manifestations of the Jacobean Holy Year, dedicated to the patron saint of Pistoia, whose treasure was stolen by Vanni Fucci. On the occasion of the exhibition, this installation becomes part of the permanent collection of Palazzo Fabroni.
The exhibition also transforms the opportunity provided by Cantica21 to create a new work into an opportunity to bring to light his strong conceptual coherence of the artist’s entire production through a broad exhibition path with past works and unpublished works, all exemplary of his practice.
In fact, we find there exhibited works from the past, such as NUI SIMU (That’s us) (2011) and Estman Radio Drama (2011) celebrating the ten years since their presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2011, as well as The School of Narrative Dance: Ongoing Documentary that retraces some of the participatory experiences organized since 2013 around the world by Marinella Senatore.
Associated with these works are more recent ones: the luminaria Assembly (2017), the drawings in the It’s Time to Go Back to Street series (2019), and the two important cycles Un corpo unico and Autoritratto (2020), which, made for the solo exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid in 2020 and brought to further development at Palazzo Fabroni with new productions, mark an evolution in the artist’s practice. Rather than works constituted by or derived from the participatory actions in public spaces for which Marinella Senatore is known, Un corpo unico and Autoritratto were conceived in her studio, but they have the same valence as those participatory actions, developing a reflection on the very concept of participation.