Marinella Senatore’s film Manuale per i viaggiatori (“Manual for Travellers”) is the first project produced by the Madre of Naples for the spaces of the museum’s Project Room, devoted to the national and international panorama of emerging art. The work, produced in part within the museum spaces in August 2007, is notable as being a work of public art in whose production the city played a fundamental point.
The set of the film was a true open laboratory, where individual visitors were invited to watch and in some cases take part in the cycles of shooting.
The work has the taste of an intense autobiographical narrative where the different actors, chosen through popular casting, are given the task of recounting, evoking, and interpreting the many stories that the artist collected over the years, which with time have fused fantasy and reality in uniquely evocative visual and narrative pieces.
Like all the videos made by Marinella Senator, the narrative element is only the thread running through a denser web, in which the editing and photography as well as the music all form part of the narration. This special narrative mode, typical of her work, embodies the artist’s ability to use the language of film to enhance the visionary qualities of a medium that has always been a fertile tool for all kinds of experiments.