Unique performances, rhythmic dj sets, workshops of all kinds: for its 20th anniversary, the Palais de Tokyo is celebrating the pleasure of being together. For 4 days Marinella Senatore has imagined a unique festival bringing together more than 40 associations of professional and amateur artists and sportsmen. By impregnating the Palais de Tokyo with her participative art, the Italian artist creates a moment of active citizenship.

Over the past ten years, Marinella Senatore has been developing a participatory artform that experiments with the creative power of the group, building dialogues between historical, cultural and social structures.

Through an approach that involves investigation and exchange and which is structured by documentary methods, she works to bring forth alternative systems of sociability: vast parades, a hymn, a tea room, a radio play or a filmed opera.

Marinella Senatore carries out “actions” akin to contemporary rituals and produces installations to reconstruct communities and nourish collective memories. Through art, which she conceives as a social sculpture, she seeks to give material form to questions and to redistribute the roles of amateur and professional, of artist and audience.

Building on this approach, at the Palais de Tokyo Marinella Senatore has questioned the meaning of the institution’s past twenty years as well as the role of the art centre today, seeking to identify its social body in a in a post-pandemic world.

This reflection has given rise to Bodies in Alliance, a 4-day takeover of the Palais de Tokyo that takes the form of an artistic occupation of spaces by and for communities of artists from a host of different backgrounds and disciplines. It is a project that celebrates togetherness, social and political engagement, feminism and inclusivity, and which is built around personal fulfilment and non-hierarchical learning, self-teaching and the creation of forms of citizenship that can be activated through informal education.

As part of her takeover, the artist has also invited numerous artistic communities with social and political commitments in order to create a space of inclusivity, sharing and collective experience.

In this way, Marinella Senatore looks to produce a physical and symbolic space through a scenography whose material narrative embodies a story, a process, and a gathering place, which also incorporates phrases from the artist’s eclectic personal archives.

These slogans call for emancipation and self-determination, acting as mantras for personal flourishing and flowering.

Light is here used as an ephemeral architecture, a public square, marking out real spaces of coming together and of sociability.

These luminous monuments do not look to honour some past event but are instead dedicated to citizenship, to its spiritual and mental potential, and to new ways of being together.

A cycle repeated over four days featuring a series of different performances

Workshops : 2 PM – 6 PM
Collective performance : 7 PM- 9 PM
DJ sets : 9.30 PM – 12 PM