The artist and activist Marinella Senatore’s oeuvre spans diverse media; its defining feature is participatory involvement. Her site-specific performance and installation projects are always produced in consultation and cooperation with various local groups. Since 2012, Senatore’s central project “The School of Narrative Dance,” a multidisciplinary and nomadic tuition-free school, has empowered several million people all over the world—including members of choruses, trade unionists, housewives, students, feminists, people with disabilities, unemployed people, musicians, illiterates—to take possession of public spaces through dance. The festive street parades are developed in a collaborative process. In terms of both strategy and aesthetics, they borrow from rallies and protests. Senatore deliberately approaches heterogeneous demographics, inviting prospective participants in open calls in multiple languages that often specifically address groups that have little visibility in society. The imagery and writings produced during the workshops and the parades themselves then become material for subsequent projects, like her embroidered fabric banners, which are inspired in equal measure by the church flags of religious processions and the trade union banners of the labor movement.

For the Graben in Vienna, Senatore extends her “Protest Forms” series with new outdoor pieces. Above the heads of passersby, five banners, each with different designs on the two faces, fly from colorful flagpoles, turning with the wind. Their materiality and facture quote the traditional standards and flags of religious processions and social protest movements. Pictorial and textual elements are arranged collage-style, executed as appliqués and embroideries in several layers. The lines of text were contributed by local groups of women with different cultural backgrounds—the women’s educational and community center “Piramidops” and the intersectional „Schwarze Frauen Community“ (“Black Women’s Community”) association— who were invited to propose statements and phrases around the theme of “the power of community” for the banners. Senatore selected passages from their reflections and messages and combined them with materials from her archive. Silhouettes of figures, bodies in motion, plants, and buildings from earlier participatory projects suggest diverse narrative strands, which she brings together in multilayered visual compositions.

The title of the work, “I Contain Multitudes,"¹ a line from the poet Walt Whitman, reads as positively programmatic, as the banners amalgamate the words, ideas, and images of diverse communities. Not as an expression of a shared identity but to articulate coexisting multitudes, Senatore gathers these groups in her projects to promote the spirit of community and solidarity.

¹ Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” from the book of poems Leaves of Grass, 1855.