Marinella Senatore is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and activist who, since 2006, has developed public participation projects, engaging entire communities in the creation of collective works.
For the foyer of Teatro della Cometa, the artist worked with the theatre’s archive, extracting landscapes and theatrical scenographies from documentary materials, as well as developing a visual storytelling composed of images inspired by the writers and intellectuals with whom Mimì Pecci Blunt — the theatre’s cosmopolitan and visionary founder — maintained close relationships.
The Theatre of the Commons is the title of this site-specific installation, in which the presence of landscape plays a dominant role as a foundational element of human communities. Through the term “Commons,” the artist once again underscores the importance of community, the sharing of resources, and collective practices — elements that resonate strongly, historically, politically, and visually, with the practice of embroidery. This series of hand-embroidered banners, produced in close collaboration with the ateliers of the Chanakya embroidery school in Mumbai, replaces the existing drapery and adorns the walls, overturning the perception of the space, which ceases to function as a neutral container and instead becomes a living public square and a catalyst for thought.
Through these striking standards, Senatore explores the multiple facets and legacies of communal gathering systems typical of popular ceremonies, in which banners were carried in procession through village streets, here endowed with a renewed artistic and intellectual status.
Each banner has been conceived by the artist as a micro-scenography resonating with themes of female empowerment. Senatore’s nomadic approach integrates seamlessly into this cultural project, which symbolically unites Rome, la Ville éternelle, with Paris, la Ville Lumière, through the compelling figure of Mimì Pecci Blunt, who lived between these two urban realities, fostering a dynamic exchange of theatrical, musical, literary, and pictorial production by bringing the best of both capitals into dialogue.
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