Marinella Senatore’s video All the Things I Need draws inspiration from classic musicals. It begins with a young man singing about his favourite time of the day against an interplay of darkness and light, night and day. This is followed by other scenes of a similar nature, all in the same simple and artificial setting of a bare domestic interior. Instead of following a coherent narrative thread, the various episodes seem to follow one another in terms of mental associations, as when delving into impenetrable subjective memory. They thus contrast with the cinematic setting, where the carefully calibrated use of lighting, shadow, editing and camera movement suggests precisely this sort of coherence. The importance and presence with which the action and characters are endowed at the visual level are reflected also in the dramatic nature of singing but show no immediate linear correspondence with the content of the lyrics, which tell stories that are decontextualized and therefore generate an effect of estrangement.
In constructing her stories, Marinella Senators uses the elements of cinematographic language – montage, camera movement, artificial lighting and sound – and probes their limits with the aid of exuberant characters. Past, present and future are no longer clearly delimited but brought together in a temporal fusion. Her films have no main storyline with a beginning and an end but rather an interweaving of micro-stories of life that are normally ignored. Due to the citation of standard cinematic constructions, every scene appears strangely familiar to the spectators, and the memory of their cinema experiences interacts with Senatore’s setting to generate a new overall framework. It is thus cinema itself that her works call into question. All the Things I Need again reveals its nature as a compendium of subjective memories that are disassembled, reassembled and born anew in every film.
Marinella Senatore (Cava dei Tirreni, Italy, 1977) has presented works in solo shows at venues such as the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti in Rome and in group exhibitions at the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea in Trento, the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Viper International in Basel and the Rome Quadrennial. She lives and works in Madrid. |
