This painting is related to the big project The School of Narrative Dance. This motto is sourced from the t-shirt of a rally whose relevance for the artist grew after her experience in South Africa, where she became aware of how a politically charged context can turn someone’s own identity and personal history into a tool of discrimination. There, Black people rename themselves with popular English appellations because their first names are often misspelled and deemed too difficult by white people.

The paintings are varnished, recalling a biographical element –Senatore’s grandfather was a carpenter. The technique is now disappearing, but it was extremely popular in pre-Ikea times, when Italian families used to renew furniture with fresh varnish instead of buying new pieces. Senatore’s reuse of wood is consistent with her environmental vision but also with her ideas of aesthetic progress. In her views, painting in its canonic form died in the 1960s, when the avant-garde pushed the boundaries of traditional art to channel the social claims of counterculture and civil rights movement. For Senatore, the only way towards an original painting today is making it a collective effort to amplify the shared narratives of a community.