Hòs

2024, performance, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

HÒS explores human and non-human relationships through the concepts of host and guest. The vision of the end appears polysemous and pierced by the black holes of memory affected by senile dementia. The rituals of a nursing home are radicalized, appearing as ancestral rites of passage. The project proposes an "oracular" autonomy of neurodegenerative disease and how it alters dynamics in a residence for the elderly.

The image

The stories of elderly residents in a nursing home become the dramaturgy of the performance. In a sterile environment, three caregivers, identical in appearance, activate devices with obsolete technology. Recordings of elderly people affected by neurodegenerative diseases are played, and during the playback, we see their image come alive through performative acts. Sound becomes a fundamental tool for generating a perceptual dissonance between what is seen and what is heard. A subjective night vision headset displays the imagery described in the elderly's stories, creating a conflict with what happens live.

The research

HÒS is the root that gives rise to a spectrum of ethically opposite meanings: victim, enemy, host. This ambiguity forms the basis of the dramaturgy, a claim for oracular autonomy in the parasite. The narrative framework originates from ethnographic research conducted in a nursing home for the elderly. The material gathers poetic, direct, or indirect discourses on death. The hospice, originally "hospitium" (a place for hosting strangers), is now where people, often suffering from neurodegenerative diseases, are compelled to spend the last period of their lives. Beyond the research contributions in the nursing home, HÒS investigates the anthropological fabric of hospitality, opening up branches and grafts: becoming-animal parasite, prey and predator, host and master, enemy and victim, trap and den. The voices of the elderly encapsulate an altered biographical memory, consisting of descriptions and narratives polluted by senile dementia. This allowed the residents to transcend the limits of reason and logic, accessing a way of thinking as delirious as it is poetic.

Credits