Welcome to the eighth episode of the new Dior Talks podcast series ‘Feminist Art’. This series will highlight some of the key practitioners in the pioneering and evolving field of feminist art, a source of endless inspiration for Maria Grazia Chiuri, Creative Director of Women’s collections. 
In this episode, series host Katy Hessel, a London-based curator, writer and art-historian, speaks with Marinella Senatore, the Rome-based multimedia artist, about her challenging and politically uncompromising approach to making her work.
For the unveiling of the Cruise 2021 collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri commissioned Senatore to collaborate with local artisans on a series of mammoth light sculptures – luminarie – for the audience-free show, streamed live from Lecce in Puglia, Italy. These works incorporate varied phrases which inspired Maria Grazia Chiuri during the creation of the collection, the spirit of which is summed up by the statement, “We rise by lifting others”.
Marinella Senatore was born in Italy in 1977 and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli, the Conservatorio and the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema in Rome. This expansive education has influenced her impressively wide-ranging artistic practice ever since, as she works with video, action, photography, installation, sculpture and painting. Fascinated by ideas of participation, dialogue, history and social structures, she is highly prolific and has exhibited widely. She has shown at the Centre Pompidou, MAXXI, the Queens Museum, Kunsthaus Zürich and Castello di Rivoli amongst many others, and has participated in numerous group shows, screenings and residences.
Her all-encompassing approach to making art was a perfect contribution to Maria Grazia Chiuri’s concept for the staging of the 2021 Cruise show, and the unique set of cultural and social conditions present in the province of Puglia, which was also the collection’s primary inspiration. Senatore is constantly inspired by communities and the actions and creations achievable through a site-specific, in-person approach to examining concepts of physical and virtual space and the challenges posed by the technical limitations of photography and cinematography. With Katy Hessel she discusses the collaboration and the origins of the bond she and Maria Grazia Chiuri formed over their shared passion for Italian feminist art.