Norman Mine is the name I use for my artistic practice. I am Francesco Benenato, an Italian-born, London-based artist working across performance, moving image, fictional personas, site-specific and socially engaged practice.
I think of Norman as a platform for creating situations, relationships and collective experiences. This is connected to my own experience of arriving in London with very little, and to the people and communities that gave me space to begin again and develop an artistic practice.
A recurring question in my work is what can happen when we are given space to appear, participate, be visible or become something else. I am interested in belonging as both a personal and collective condition, shaped by vulnerability, contradiction, inclusion and exclusion.
My performative work exists largely through Dino Desica, a fictional aspiring actor. While Norman tends to create or offer platforms, Dino is constantly searching for one: a stage, recognition, visibility, a place to belong and a place where he can become. Dino draws from Italian neorealism and from performative stereotypes connected to my cultural background, particularly the tension between masculinity and queerness.
I am also interested in expanding the idea of the backstage. For me, the backstage is where contradiction becomes visible. Through rehearsal, failure, improvisation and unfinished processes, I explore what produces the image we eventually present: our intentions, desires, ambitions and insecurities, and the distance between how we want to appear and what it takes to construct that appearance.
studio [at] normanmine.co.uk