Pascale Marthine Tayou and Hans Op de Beeck at Romaeuropa Festival

The Romaeuropa Festival breaks a taboo by pairing visual arts with a digital exhibition, celebrating the reunion of different languages. Hans Op de Beeck presents the video 'Staging Silence', where anonymous hands compose and decompose a miniature landscape, elegant and minimal in sound and action. The performance 'The Valley (an apocalypse)' features a long monologue threatened by an angel with black wings, illuminated by sax music from Eric Sleichim and the Blindman group. Yinka Shonibare MBE's work 'Invisible Man', on loan from MAXXI, addresses missionaries and colonialism. Pascale Marthine Tayou, a Cameroonian artist living between Cameroon and Belgium, exhibits 'Arbres de vie'—real trees covered with objects like nails, colored eggs, feathers, knives, glass masks inspired by traditional African masks, chains, and plastic bags. His work transcends physical boundaries and defined modalities, rejecting 'styles'. The exhibition invades the Pelanda space with hyper-colored plastic streamers, cobblestones, and nails. Outside, a giant mural (not on a wall due to stability reasons) provides colorful evidence to the Macro entrance square. Tayou's work partially overcomes past issues by framing them in the 'history' chapter and opening to a vitalistic approach with contemporary freedom.