Margerita Pulè Artistexamines art interventions by Maltese artists and collectives

Feature /Malta / Outside the Gallery Context

Venice 2022

MARGERITA PUL È

A MOVING SPOT OF SUN

In July 2017, in a shabby events hall on a busy street in central Malta, a row of what can only be described as ceramic breastmugs spurt water from their pink and protruding nipples. The water is aimed at several basins on the floor below but misses and splashes onto the floor instead. A woman, artist and film-maker Charlie Cauchi, mops the floor, and pours buckets, refilling the source of her ‘boob-fountain’. Nearby, a dapper barman pours drinks into more titty-mugs. Later, the mugs are given away to visitors as mementos; “Drinking Milk in Malta is Fun” they say.

The trite clash between the sacred, the mundane, the sexual and the commercial is particularly intense in Malta, essentially a sun-bleached city-state that is nothing if not condensed. The country has, as have many post-colonies, endured a replacement of its culture with alien sustenance and a persistent incursion into cultural, intellectual, personal and metaphorical space. The subsequent vacuum persists and is felt instinctively by artists who articulate the loss through radical actions bringing together the popular, the current, the surreal and the personal. In his telling of his return to Nigeria after fifteen years away, Teju Cole comes across what he calls ‘a moving spot of sun’ – a rare and precious source of creative and cultural activity. In Malta, this spot of sun often comes not from larger institutions or topdown initiatives, but through the actions of individuals and small groups of creative people working independently. One afternoon in the summer of 2020, during a pandemic shutdown, drivers along Malta’s coast road witness a strange sight. A woman, performance artist Charlene Galea, dressed only in thigh-high stockings, lace lingerie and a vest-top printed with a man’s impossibly toned torso, clambers onto the empty frame of a billboard. There she poses, twisting her rump and thighs to the camera, looking seductive, as a photographer below clicks away. The breasts, usually so prominent in underwear shots, have morphed into a solid six-pack. The unseemly clash of meaty male muscle and white-as-milk lingerie is unnerving.

Her act speaks to the commercialisation of women’s bodies but also serves as a reaction to the humdrum juxtaposing of all aspects of life that characterises the Maltese Islands. The body gives way to space and (concrete) materiality; Malta’s condensed state - overbuilt and overused – leaves little room in which to move. Private interests and commercial enterprise have milked the archipelago for all it’s got; even our airspace has been privatised to make way for advertising.

In the summer of 2021, a man, artist Matthew Attard, stands in a nondescript country lane. He is wearing an eye-tracking device – he moves his head slowly to take in his surroundings and record the road, the fields, the rubble walls, the commemorative plaque nearby. The spot where he stands was the site of the racially-motivated murder of Lassana Cisse Souleymane, father of three from Ivory Coast. The plaque on the wall installed by the authorities bears the ill-judged words ‘All Lives Matter’ below his name. Attard’s series of works referred to codes of silence, the normalisation of violence, and complacency in the face of misdeeds. The same authorities tell us not to let the murder define us as Maltese people and as a nation; the place of Cisse Souley-mane’s death has been expropriated and politicised. Move on is the message; no use crying over spilt milk.

Later in the same year, two young Tunisian men, artist Mohamed Ali (Dali) Aguerbi and choreographer Chakib Zidi, walk down the staircase of an uninhab-ited old house in a coastal town. They mingle with the audience, gracefully slipping in and out of outfits as they tread; pinstriped trousers give way to a silk dress and high heels, this in turn is replaced by a length of linen wrapped around the waist, hammam-style. The couple were (separately) forced to leave Tunisia because of their sexual orientation, and here in Malta, they advocate for the rights of other LGBTQ+ refugees and migrants. They, too, follow their spot of sun; the material and spatial flow back to concepts of the relational, complex and contingent body.

It’s 2022, and two women are sitting in Pjazza Kastilja – a public space in front of the Office of the Prime Minister in Valletta. The space, they realise, is dominated by men; policemen, civil servants, delivery men, even soldiers, pass by or stand guard. The women – choreographer and artist Florinda Camilleri and visual artist Abigail Agius – sit and take in their surroundings. They plot visual, sensorial and aural maps of the space. They experiment with how their bodies interact with the surfaces around them, with the very materiality of the space. A policeman approaches and asks them what they’re doing. Security is watching from a nearby window. A man having breakfast on the roof of an adjacent hotel snaps photos of them with a zoom lens. In their search for new ways of relating to the space around them, the two artists are watched intently; the eyes around them encroach on their personal space, on their right to be there and move around as they wish.

There are others attempting to reclaim a space – a spot of sun, too many to list here; Victor Agius hammering at cement blocks near the Megalithic Temples of Ggantija in Gozo in opposition to the impending building of apartment blocks overlooking the site, Romeo Roxman Gatt building an archive of trans men and LBQI masculine presenting people in Malta, Gilbert Calleja spending nights on board a fishing vessel recording the intense work on the fishermen on board, or Kristina Borg working with residents of rapidly changing coastal towns, to name just a few. These acts of documenting, creating, and resisting are what Teju Cole calls ‘the signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope’.

Charlene Galea, I am the Billboard (2020) Public action. Photo by Etienne Farrell Florinda Camilleri & Abigail Agius, place matter(s) (2022) Research project & mixed media installation, exhibited The Ordinary Lives of Women (2022) at Spazju Kreattiv, curated by Elise Billiard Pisani & Margerita Pulè. Photo by Niels Plotard Mohamed Ali (Dali) Aguerbi & Chakib Zidi, Dress Code (2021) Performative action, performed at Debatable Land(s), Fleeting Territories, Unfinished Art Space & Greta Muscat Azzopardi. Photo by Elisa von Brockdorff