At the invitation of Teatro Regio to live the public space of the city of Parma, OHT begins a new research on some words and their etymology. On the tip of the tounge is a work that forces the audience to look where it does not want to. A small anthology on the racist ghosts hidden in our words to which we do not pay enough attention.

If the word ambaradan in Italian means a confused, chaotic situation, or a shambles, its origin refers to the Ethiopian mountain massif in the Tigray region, Amba Aradan, where in 1936 the Italian army used chemical weapons [including mustard gas and phosgene] in a heinous war crime. Or the word zombie, which recalls cinema and those catatonic hordes of dead-living creatures that slowly attack humans; in fact its origin is Congolese, from the word nzumbe, [meaning spirit, fetish] and was used to identify workers on Caribbean plantations. Or Menelik's Tongue, the little carnival whistle in which you blow into it and a long paper tongue unfurls whistling, is so called to mock the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II, accused by the Italian colonists of being a liar with a forked tongue.

OHT's new work explores this invisible form of racism that is still in our mouths, on our lips and on the tip of our tongues. If etymology traces the ultimate meaning of language almost exclusively to Greek or Latin, On the tip of the tounge deconstructs this hegemonic origin by bringing out the ghosts of a creolized language. Hybrid words, with uncertain etymology, that hide a monstrous origin that we are unable to see because of the painful reality to which it refers.

The video installation can be visited until October 15 in Piazza Picelli in Parma, within the Verdi OFF 2022 review.

The video is made available online for the Eighteenth Giornata del Contemporaneo.

ON THE TIP OF THE TONGUE

video installation by OHT - Office for a Human Theatre > idea Filippo Andreatta > sound and music Davide Tomat > words Veronica Franchi > editing Anouk Chambaz crew in Etiopia > video direction Meaza Worku > director of photography Matiwos Nigussie > actress Zebiba Hialu > sound Amelework Mezemir > coordinator Zekariyas Kassu > location manager Biniam Getachew > camera assistant Lemma Tewabe > production Office for a Human Theatre, Fondazione Teatro Regio di Parma in the context of Verdi OFF > OHT is associated to CSC S. Chiara di Trento