Norman Mine is the artistic practice of Italian-born, London-based artist Francesco Benenato, working across performance, moving image, installation and socially engaged practice.
His work occupies an unstable space between lived experience and fiction. Personal histories, relationships, encounters and ordinary situations become material to be performed, displaced and reimagined. Rather than separating what is real from what is constructed, Mine is interested in the movement between the two, and in how identity can be rehearsed, contradicted and continually rewritten.
Improvisation and failure are central to this process. A rehearsal can become the work, an accident can redirect it, and the presence of a camera or an audience can transform an everyday situation into performance. The recurring fictional performer Dino Desica emerges from this instability. Driven by the desire to belong, to be recognised and to become someone else, Dino allows autobiography and invention to contaminate one another until neither remains entirely secure.
This movement from personal experience towards other possibilities also informs Mine’s socially engaged practice. Through workshops, collective actions and long-term collaborations, he creates situations in which people bring their own experiences, abilities and ways of knowing into the creative process. The encounter itself can alter the work, shifting authorship between artist, participant and context.
Across these different forms, Mine treats art not as a way of fixing experience, but as a space in which it can be rehearsed, exchanged and imagined otherwise.