For 20 years now, the Palais de Tokyo has been making its mark on the Parisian, French and international contemporary art scene. As a vibrant art centre, a place for encounters between contemporary art and a wide range of audiences, a sounding board for the major issues of the contemporary world and the questions that animate today’s artists, it has been bringing together and broadening imaginations since 2002.

For the Palais de Tokyo’s twentieth anniversary, and after two years spent rethinking the question of how to be together and how to constitute a chosen, physical community once again, the institution is pleased to host a festival imagined as a moment of active citizenship emblematic ofa collective reflection upon new rituals and open forms.

This reflection has led the Palais de Tokyo to offer a carte-blanche invitation to Marinella Senatore (Cava de’ Tirreni, Italy, 1977), who has become one of the best- known Italian artists on the international scene thanks to the social and political orientation of her work and her pieces that are conceived as a polyvocal artistic experience.

Since the creation in 2012 of the School of Narrative Dance (SOND) by Marinella Senatore, she has been developing a participatory artform that experiments with the creative power of the group, building dialogues between historical, cultural and social structures. This year 2022 marks the tenth anniversary of the SOND.

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.