Hòs

2024, performance; Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

HÒS is the root that gives life to a series of ethically opposed meanings: victim, enemy, guest. The dramaturgy is built on this ambiguity. The narrative frame was born from ethnographic research carried out in a retirement home for the elderly. The material collects poetic, direct or indirect discourses on death. The hospice, originally a hospitium (a place where foreigners are hosted), is today the place where people, often suffering from neurodegenerative diseases, are forced to spend the last period of their lives. In addition to the contributions of research in the retirement home, HÒS investigates the anthropological links of the concept of hospitality, opening up branches and grafts: becoming a parasitic animal, prey and predator, host and master, enemy and victim, trap and lair. The project proposes an "oracular" autonomy of the parasite. The guest abandons a marginal position and obtains an active function that allows different access to the vision of the end. The figure of the host-parasite, in the project, is embodied by the voice of elderly people with senile dementia. The elderly person suffering from a neurodegenerative disease is outside the common space-time. He is an external subject, an alien. In the project the unwanted guest instead becomes the one who creates narration, story and dramaturgy: taking on the main role precisely because he is so alien to us. His extraneousness creates discomfort, calls into question an entire organism, an entire pre-existing system. For this reason he favors change, change, in the system in which he operates.

The claim of “oracular” autonomy in the parasite In the nursing home, the guest abandons his marginal position and takes on an active function, thus allowing a different approach to understanding the final phase of life. The figure of the host-parasite is represented by the voice of the elderly suffering from senile dementia. The host, suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, places himself outside the common space-time, becoming a foreign, alien subject. In this project, the unwanted guest instead transforms into the one who creates narrations, tales and dramaturgy, taking on a central role precisely because of his alien nature. His extraneousness generates discomfort and calls into question the entire social organism, destabilizing the pre-existing system. This destabilization, however, not only generates change, but also imposes a mutation in the system in which the host-parasite acts.

Direction and dramaturgy: Salvatore Crucitti, Gloria Zeppilli
Sound design: Michele Febbraio
Coreography: Francesca Santamaria
Performers: Adele Maria Masciello, Francesca Santamaria, Gloria Zeppilli

Thanks to: the guests of the "La mia Casa" CIDAS residence in Tresigallo, Elisa Finessi, Cristina Ventrucci, Societas, Casa di Gesso, Ana Trif, Quarticciolo Library Theater and Momigliano Animal Farm

Biennale College Teatro 2024