Insulaphilia - Atlantis, Utopia, Robinson Crusoe's island: throughout recorded history, islands have been considered the antithesis to the mainland, but French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposes islands as containing the intensity of the world itself. The possibility of an island is always the possibility of a world. maltabiennale.art, happening in 2024, is conceived as a Mediterranean biennale that intends to investigate insular thinking, able to see the island not as a postcard utopia but as a delimitation that produces learning and encounters. Far from being something pure, the island is always a principle of composition and invention. Located in the centre of the Mediterranean, the island of Malta is an ideal observatory to question current issues in the area and to imagine new possible futures alongside the artists' vision. Location is the immediate identifier of any isolated land mass; Malta’s maritime lore dates back centuries, and its crucial role throughout history has been as a strategic crossroads in the Mediterranean. Malta is adept at transformation, as a crossing of arrival and departure; as a nation-state, the Maltese identity emerges from centuries of colonisation. Indelibly linked to the various seafaring cultures that have dominated and declined through the region, Malta’s natural harbours have provided shelter, refuge and trading outposts to all who sought to settle, conquer, and reign – from the Phoenicians; the Romans; the Byzantines; the Arabs; the Normans; the Order of St. John; the French; and finally, the British. Malta’s identity is hewn from stone, with each civilisation leaving its mark in the form of megalithic temples, ancient baths, catacombs, complex fortifications, baroque grandeur, army barracks, and dockyards. Malta’s capital, Valletta, is an ideal creation of the late Renaissance, with its uniform urban plan inspired by neo-platonic principles, and is a protected UNESCO World International Heritage city. maltabiennale.art seeks to delve into the concept of identity in a multiple and plural dimension, where the encounter and exchange with other cultures is its cornerstone, along with a dutiful and painful awareness of the trauma of colonisation. Public space is to be investigated in the conflicting nature of the planning of underlying memories in the political contingencies that have traversed the Euro-Mediterranean geographic and social territory, marking and marching militarised borders and territories. maltabiennale.art aims to engage a diverse demographic, claiming public spaces with arresting interventions, with the scope of providing a key for the public to discover the complex of works and discourse, to be programmed over the course of two months in the spring of 2024. A participatory configuration of invisible networks across the Mediterranean will connect the East to the West and the North to the South to stimulate exchange, vision and rereadings of the nomadic and traditional geographies and identities within the region.
Sofia Baldi Pighi - Artistic Director - Independent Italian curator based in Milan. Since 2017, she has been focusing on the encounter between art, historical and landscape heritage through contemporary art exhibitions, public programs and ad hoc art therapy workshops for public and private institutions. Sofia Baldi Pighi was part of the curatorial team of the first Italian National Pavilion – Che cosa sogna l’acqua quando dorme? – for the 14th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, curated by Valentina Buzzi and promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in Seoul, supported by the Embassy of Italy in Korea, Quadriennale di Roma, and the European Media Art Platform, co-founded by the European Union. Baldi Pighi is a curator for Una Boccata d’Arte 2023, a contemporary art project spread throughout Italy, promoted by Fondazione Elpis in collaboration with Galleria Continua, with the participation of Threes Productions. Through exhibitions, lectures, and workshops, she has collaborated together with various museum institutions and universities, including Triennale (Milan); MANN Archeological Museum (Napoli); Pilotta Monumental Complex, (Parma), Permanente Museum (Milan); Orientale University (Napoli), Brera Fine Arts Academy (Milan), NABA New Fine Arts Academy (Milan), SwissInstitute (Milan); Virgilio Sienis’ Academy of Art and Gesture (Florence), Order of Architects (Milan). Baldi Pighi has collaborated with various national and international companies to support art projects: Corneliani Spa (founding the Corneliani Art Collection), Confcommercio Lombardia; Repower; A2A; Servizi Italia; AIDDA – Association of Women Business Executives. She is also the curator of the artistic didactic collective PSICO.LOBO, which fuses psychology and performance and is an active member of the autonomous association Art Workers Italia.
Nigel Baldacchino - Setup Designer - Multi histories and shifting cultural significance - maltabiennale.art 2024 seeks to suggest and manifest broad, peripheral, mythological narratives that augment the stories that have shaped Maltese culture in its Mediterranean context. The idea is to think of Malta not just as a geographic observatory, but also a cultural one. The venues chosen for the Biennale lend themselves poignantly for this scope. Imbued with their own multiple histories and shifting cultural significance, also through their emblematic architectural and spatial qualities and materiality – they offer a potent backdrop for artworks to resist, resonate with, bounce off, or simply occupy. This contributes toward a fairly singular scenario, wherein presented artworks cannot but be site-specific, since they are responding to something unique in the spatial and curatorial path. Among the strengths of this situation, is that it makes it such that hypothetically transporting the same artworks and shows to another country would arguably change their significance. This specificity is also what fuels the thinking behind the set design. The material and aesthetic idioms explored, actively respond to the cultural signifiers that Maltese and Mediterranean life carry with them, drawing energy from prehistory to contemporary history. This is done while bearing in mind the one thing that ties Maltese history together: our geology – Globigerina and Coralline limestone, constituting all the venues to be used, from all the periods of history to this very day. The spaces are unequivocally mineral in their expression – the stone manifests in every surface needed for shelter across the millennia, and in every shape needed for praise, expression and day-to-day living. The exhibition design cannot but inhabit these situations, and tailor itself around them. Unlike other areas of design, exhibition design has very clearly defined, time-specific goals and scope – that is, to act as an interface between presented artworks and hosting spaces, always serving the works’ needs as best understood by the curators and producers of the work. It is also a tool that can help shape a visual identity across varied spaces, in the way it asserts itself, guiding a visitor’s attention along a path. In this case, the character of expression of the setup elements will need to anchor comfortably in the peculiar thematic and spatial qualities of the Biennale. This also inherently leads to material choices that are meaningfully sustainable and/or reusable in the local industrial context. Sustainability is not envisioned as a visual cue – of things made to ‘look’ sustainable – but as a kind of sourcing and production that is mindful of contemporary local recycling and re-use practices. This first edition biennale will seek to re-contextualise our parallel histories by evoking relationships between salient national/international artistic expression related to the set theme, and parts of our history (emblems of cultural heritage) that often tend towards a frozen static cultural significance in the collective mind. Coming across these artistic bodies of work within these venues is a poignant way of doing just that. In a way it is testament to the multitude of ways to tell one’s own story to oneself by widening the scope of one’s gaze backwards, around and forward.
Elisa Carollo - Curator - Turning Malta into a privileged observatory of the journey of human civilization from the past to the present - Elisa Carollo is an Italian art advisor, curator, and USPAP-compliant appraiser based in the US, NYC. I believe that this Biennale can be a great opportunity for both Malta, and all the artists involved. The richly multilayered history of the island, its cultural and geopolitical role and position through centuries, and the great set of mythology and mysterious stories surrounding it, will certainly provide a unique ground for international artists to engage with this rich heritage and the Mediterranean culture and history at large, while addressing some of the most pressing issues of our time. Malta has always both divided and connected profoundly different cultures, resulting in a characteristically eclectic fabric of cultures and ethnicity, as well as hybridization and exchange. In this sense, I believe that Malta can really inspire a more multicultural approach, that can help to transition and embrace a global vision we need today, that goes beyond the national frontiers and accepts the cultural richness and growth that can result from this exchange. As we saw in the past Biennales, artists show not only to be more and more aware of the major problematics of our globe, but also willing to directly deal with those in their practices aiming if not at finding solutions, at least inspiring an alternative approach and paradigm of coexistence between human beings, and with other species. This often results today in works that tap into ancestral wisdom, ancient knowledge and primordial spiritualities and energies, which I believe artists will find and feel also on the island. In this sense, I really hope that with this Biennale the island can really have the opportunity to turn into a privileged observatory of the journey of human civilization from the past to the present, to try to imagine a more sustainable and equitable future. Artists have in fact this ability to foresee or imagine what the future will retain, helping us to attend to the essential concerns of all human life and relate ourselves to lives in the future. Art is thoroughly rooted in reality, after all, but it is also able, as dreams, to vividly be in a simultaneous relation to the ‘three orders’ of our perception of the world: Real, Symbolic and Imaginary. In this way artists can bring to tangible forms powerful visions or urgent concerns that reside in the collective unconscious. So far we have had incredibly enthusiastic feedback from major names in today’s contemporary art scene who are interested in engaging with the unique historical and cultural context of Malta. Despite their busy calendars, most of the artists invited were willing to participate either with new projects specifically conceived for the curatorial sections and this special context or adapting existing ones to the location. The incredibly beautiful venues that Heritage Malta made available for this Biennale, is certainly helping to inspire and motivate artists to bring their art to the island. That’s also the reason why I also enthusiastically joined the curatorial team, when invited: I see in this Biennale a unique opportunity of both creative activation and promotion of an incredible heritage, and an inspiring platform where artists will really be able to create powerful works that can talk about our time at this point of civilization.
Emma Mattei - Arts and culture Journalist - In Search of Common Places: Art with Audiences - What could be more motivating than facilitating the possibility of actualising ‘common places’ where social urgencies and art may intersect, affect and transform? Where the contentions of economics, migration, education, racism and indigeneity are re-contextualised within a benign, fluid, ever-expandable and unconfined space? To move through and beyond, with the hope of finding a ‘common place’, where the focus shifts towards something other, unimagined and as yet, unrealised? For Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, the ‘special places’ of discourse are perishing and dissolving, while immediate visibility is being gained by the ‘common places’, generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse. For many, there is a sense of navigating without a compass; that we are no longer able to rely on forms of thought devoid of a standard of orientation. Dr Janna Graham, initiator and curator of the Centre For Possible Studies, an offsite curatorial programme of Serpentine Galleries, and lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmith’s University of London, points out that whilst art institutions employ public programming it often doesn’t belong exclusively to any professional niche within the ecology of institutions and organisations. Her premise is to think with and without conditions when it comes to public programming, a notion that requires for those with agency to seek ingenious methods of creating pathways, allotting resources and ultimately reframing the existing modus operandi. Relevance is key to the creation of a programme without conditions, and should not limit ideas before they are able to expand, flex and reach. According to Dr Graham, who has been a key player in the ‘educational turn’ of recent public programming within leading institutions, recent radical praxes suggest a discipline of working through existing patterns of thought, speech, affect, care and organisation, of questions of the so-called private and public spheres, of questions of space and time, of questions of the material and the immaterial. To be able to achieve the aims of a substantial programme demands supple, agile and dexterous strategies, often looking from the ground up, rather than the more favoured top-down hierarchical direction of established intellectual and social practice. Being caught up in these primary concerns may seem to detract from the initial ambitions and intentions – the more visceral desires that underpin human connectivity, which is to acknowledge, and to be acknowledged, to participate in a way that is not token or superficial, but rather sincere in its approach, if not exact in its method, and perhaps most courageously and defiantly, inconclusive in its outcome. Finally, there is the intention of allowing for celebration of the commonalities of the ostensibly disparate, the vernacular and the high-brow, the lofty and the gritty, such ‘stuff as dreams are made of’. Emma Mattei is an arts and culture journalist. She is a co-founder of Kinemastik NGO and programmer at the Kinemastik International Short Film Festival (KISFF). She founded the international publishing project Uncommon Guide Books in 2011, issuing editions in Malta, Stockholm, London, Dubai and Cairo. She is currently in production with a feature-length documentary about cinema and identity.
https://maltabiennale.art/
