Rosas – Opera in 3 Acts, 2012

The work that Marinella Senatore presents since 2006 is grounded in a desire of profaning the devices of spectacle, restoring at the free use what has been captured, what has been separated from it. Each of the individuals involved in each film project brings his or her personal approach, mute tactics, anonymous activity, not interpretable, not symbolizable. But above all a personal way of using what is imposed by and drawn from mainstream production. In this sense, talking about participation in reference to Senatore’s work is limiting. While Rosas (2012) that will be shown at Bangkok Art Biennale is a three-act opera for the screen and involves a number of participants that only a blockbuster could employ, these subjects do not play a secondary role (as normally would be the case but rather, enter actively into the process of creation and production as screenwriters, costumers, actors, singers, sound technicians, camera operators, set designers, choreographers, managers, fundraisers. Essentially, with a choral, plural agency of decision making But restoring things to free or potential use or reclaiming what has been taken away from us also means, above all, showing the purely contingent nature of how functions are assigned by the system of spectacle, its categories of visibility and invisibility, the distribution of bodies and parts. In fact, in both spectacle and society, we already know our roles: the viewers know they are viewers and the actors know they are actors. Who is to perform and who is to watch the performance is decided beforehand. The method that Senatore has developed to upend the hierarchy of roles and restrictions is a specific teaching method that we find in her ongoing project “The School of Narrative Dance”, a sort of appropriate counter-device she founded in 2013. Since then public parades, urban processions, travelling the streets and lanes of city centres and activated by “The School of Narrative Dance”, are springing up on every latitude of the Planet.