Telling a story, trying to hide it in the phrases, approaching it through form, through time, metamorphosing it. (Pascale Marthine Tayou, 2006).

Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Il Genio dell'Aquila is an apparition in the middle of the cloister of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts.

Inspired by the rich history of the building, Pascale pays tribute to all the souls who have passed through the history of these walls by installing a totem, made of crystal, in the center of the Academy's courtyard, surrounded by colored crystals.

Continuing the themes of his Poupées Pascale and Les Sauveteurs series, Pascale Marthine Tayou seeks to make transparent the ritual and spiritual aspect of the totems through crystal.

By dressing these totems with materials of various origins, he embodies the process of creolization theorized by Édouard Glissant: a “mixing of arts and languages that produces the unexpected

[...], a space in which dispersion allows for rapprochement, where cultural shocks, disharmonies, disorder, and interference become creative forces.”

Here in Aquila, his totem becomes a living spirit, powerfully « charged » by the colored crystals that are all around him, standing here as a spiritual emblem.