It's all Paperwork

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Forewords
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Forewords
Hon. Minister Owen Bonnici 1
Jason Micallef 3
Catherine Tabone 5
It’s All Paperwork’ by Melanie Erixon 6-11
The Curator 14
The Sculptor as a Model of his Passion’ by Georges Lemaire 16-23
The Works 25-53
The Artist 54-57
‘It’s All Paperwork’ by talented sculptor Antoine Farrugia shows how Maltese Globigerina Limestone is transformed into something that resembles “almost paper.” Initiatives like this exhibition strengthen the artistic and cultural aspects by highlighting our limestone as a very important resource as well as showcasing the innovative use of this natural material in such cultural events.
We will continue to invest in our culture in order to support the creative and cultural sectors. Maltese participation is of utmost importance in such events and we encourage local artists to take advantage and display their creations. Through such efforts, we continue fulfilling our mission to expose our local cultural and creative industries further. It is wonderful to host such exhibitions and keep the culture alive.
Not so long ago, the arts belonged only to the few. From its inception, the Valletta Cultural Agency’s mission has been to promote access to quality projects. Accessibility, for us, was not just some cheap buzzword. We always wanted to win a wider audience. However, we steered away from philistine populism.
We believe that art and culture should not be superficial and transient. We have always insisted on creating and supporting projects that possess richness, depth and originality.
We are against the downgrading of culture to mere entertainment - Art can never be just some hedonistic distraction. Society, now more than ever, seems to be geared towards quick and easy pleasures. Art today seems too voluble. We must never duplicate the capricious and dazzling spectacles that seem to mushroom everywhere. We believe that appearance should never be more important than essence. Quality should never be sacrificed for quantity. Access does not mean compromise.
Luckily for us, this is not the case of Antoine Farrugia. His ability is unparalleled and there is a clear depth of thought. One can clearly see genuine artistic creativity. His work demands attention and respect. This exhibition is more than aesthetic pleasure.
It is a great honour for everyone at the Valletta Cultural Agency to present these works to the public at Malta’s highest instituition, the Parliament. It is yet another affirmation of our commitment to support quality.
Tradition, Innovation, Consolidation: this is the threepronged paradigm on which the ethos of the Valletta Cultural Agency rests.
As a Government agency, the VCA is responsible for facilitating the promulgation of art in all its forms and shapes. Whatever the project, the VCA is at the service of art, at striving to achieve ever higher levels of excellence, at giving its patrons the best cultural and educational experience. The varied programme we devise each year attests to this and we are immensely proud that we are attracting the best artists, both local and international, to share their experiences with us. It is not only important to introduce new artistic endeavour, new modes of thinking, but it is also vital that we consolidate what we know, that we help in reconfiguring our knowledge in order for it to mean differently in a different context, at translating the ephemeral into the enduring.
As CEO of the Valletta Cultural Agency, I am always looking for new ways to consolidate the old. As T.S. Eliot puts it, ‘Tradition cannot mean standing still’; it needs to be constantly rethought and revised, and only an ‘awareness of history will make the past contemporary’. I feel that Antoine Farrugia is the perfect exemplar of this combination of tradition, innovation and consolidation. He needs no introduction: he is certainly a prime mover when it comes to working in limestone. In his hands, the steadfast limestone yields to the contours of the shapes he gently suggests to it: it twists and curls, stretches and contorts, almost in a distinctly human attempt at taking on a life of its own. It is innovation, of course, but it is also a consolidation of ancient traditions that have given us the most sublime works of art. It is, simply put, an act of love.
It’s all paperwork, but you shall see no paper. For those familiar with the term ‘trompe l’oeil’, normally used to describe paintings which are so realistic that deceive the eye, after visiting this exhibition, one might understand why I feel confident enough using this term to describe these sculptures, in this short essay. The works making up this exhibition are deceiving enough to seem like paper, but in fact the medium is our beloved Globigerina Limestone.
I am honoured to be curating this exhibition for Antoine Farrugia and the Valletta Cultural Agency. Antoine is one of my very best and loudest friends, and I have been following his artistic journey for the last 15 years or so. From being tasked to purchase his tools every time I visit Florence, to the privilege to be the first (or one of the first) to see each and every artwork that he creates and the works in progress. Unfortunately, I am also the first to endure the aftermath of the rare occurrence when one of his fragile beauties breaks up, at the very last moments of the finishing touches – basically I know too much about Antoine Farrugia, but I’ll spare you some details. One other important thing to mention about Antoine and which we clash a bit about, is that he insists on not naming his creations. I always feel that a title completes an artwork, but Antoine disagrees, and he insists that he doesn’t want the viewer to be biased in any way when observing his beautiful, sensual, abstract forms. I also argued that he’ll make some art historian’s life miserable in the future, for someone who might be researching him and his works will have a hard time referring to specific artworks. It
also makes my life harder when I will be trying to discuss particular works from the exhibition. But worry not, we did come to an interesting agreement. In fact, we agreed that whoever becomes an owner of one of his works, will be given the opportunity to name the sculpture, which will be added to the certificate of authenticity and become the artwork’s permanent title.
Antoine Farrugia, even though an art lover since a tender age, started sculpting in his thirties. However, he evolved rapidly and exceptionally throughout the years, especially through the initial years under the guidance of Anton Grech, when he started formal training at the School of Art where he obtained his diploma in fine arts.
To understand better Antoine Farrugia, one must emphasise the fact that he hails from Mqabba (just like me). Mqabba is a tiny village, which comes to life twice a year, during the village feasts. Mqabba is famous for the manufacturing of fireworks – two factories which bring honour after honour to the tiny village – and for the fact that it is surrounded by quarries of Globigerina Limestone. This little anecdote about Mqabba is important, as we need to understand where Farrugia is coming from.
In fact, before embarking on the magnificent journey in the world of sculpture, Farrugia was a manufacturer of aerial fireworks – perhaps an art in itself, a very dangerous one. Indeed, it was just after a tragedy – a huge explosion at the fireworks factory - which took the life of Antoine’s friend and colleague, and Antoine himself miraculously surviving the day, that he decided to quit this route.
And then, the other most important thing in Mqabba came along, the ‘franka’. To be more exact, quarry work was already in his life, as his father and other members of his family used to work in quarries around Mqabba, but this was the moment where this love affair with globigerina limestone started and there was no turning back.
His early inspirations are evidently from Henry Moore and Constantin Brâncuși. His favourite medium is the Globigerina Limestone, but not only. Farrugia has produced works in marble, even Carrara marble, which comes with a long story – spoiler alert – summarized to the fact that he carried chunks of Carrara marble on his back for a long, long way. He produced large-scale works also in wood and steel. He took part in a number of workshops and symposia both locally and abroad, the one closest to his heart being the European Sculpturing Symposium in Fraunhstein, Germany, where one can also find a largescale sculpture by Antoine executed in Serpentine stone and Albanian marble, now public art. Another memorable experience was a trip to China as a guest artist, along with some fellow Maltese artists, who all came back with incredible stories and a special bonding in art.
Farrugia participated in a long list of collective exhibitions throughout the years including two participations in the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale and this is his sixth solo exhibition.
But enough about Antoine and let’s focus on the artworks forming this exhibition.
As mentioned, I have known Antoine Farrugia, for too many years and I remember when the work and research on this ‘paper’ theme had started around five years ago, when the first four works in this series were born. A surreal feat of bravura in execution and making stone look so malleable and reaching the limits of the globigerina limestone. The series was ‘shelved’ for some years, while Farrugia explored other forms - more abstract and sensual – forms that he is mostly known for. But this theme was always at the back of his mind, waiting for the right opportunity to be able to showcase them in the right exhibition… and here we are.
The first four works which were executed earlier, apart from being hanging sculptures, are set on a concrete base and one can notice that the ‘paper’ part is not polished. There is a reason behind this. Only recently (almost a year ago), Farrugia finally managed to concoct the ‘magic potion’ which enables him to polish and wax the globigerina limestone and still keep the original pristine colour of the stone (which one can observe in the newer artworks). Normally, if one applies polish on this stone, the stone darkens and loses its particular colour.
The four hanging sculptures portray pieces of paper, almost alive, caught in an imaginary breeze, defying gravity. The only alien material is one real wooden peg, which is wittily used to ‘hold the papers together’.
A few words on the newer sculptures in this series.
First of all, the bases for these sculptures are lava, which enhances a deeper contrast between sculpture and
base. Farrugia has also used similar lava bases in his last exhibition XULLIELA BAJDA. A playful array of paper usage is being investigated in this exhibition, some more unexpected than others. Have you ever seen restaurants stacking papers of ready orders onto an upright projected small rod, impaling the pieces of paper? Well, here you have it, in one of the artworks which includes a slightly tilting stainless steel rod with two ‘papers’ stuck in it.
Of course, maybe more expected, a number of sculptures are showing a more classic ‘paper-pose’, for example, the scroll like duo of papers, masterly executed in perfect roundness almost reminiscent of delicate cannelloni ready to be stuffed with goodness. Another artwork attempts the impossible by having three strata of papers gently twisted on top of each other.
I hinted at Antoine to have some play on the art of origami. At first, he threw his famous look ‘are you kidding me?’ but he slept on it. I asked for an origami paper-stone swan. He did an origami paper-stone aeroplane. But he didn’t just stop at that. He created a spectacle. The stainless steal rod here is again an integral part of the narrative, a vision of an aeroplane suspended in mid-air, in motion, like a silent performance of this lifeless – yet full of life - aeroplane flying towards a place known only to Antoine.
I can say I am ‘the source of inspiration’ for another sculpture, which I shall refer to as the paper cone. While Antoine was working hard on this theme, I invited him to take part in a collective exhibition that I curated, which is an exhibition exploring guilty pleasures. Antoine kept insisting
that he has no guilty pleasures (which would be very sad if true). So, I decided to share one of mine with him, i.e. eating three ice-creams a day (sometimes). He liked the idea and immediately started sketching (an empty ice cream cone). But a lovely thing happened. Being so absorbed in the paper theme, his ice cream cone ended up being a paper cone, which lucky for me, I could also include in this exhibition as well.
Another sculpture where the stainless steel rod is incorporated is showing a ‘thin’ strip of paper twirling over itself, stuck to the rod, which recalls a beautiful performance of rhythmic gymnastics using ribbon. But that is only in my imagination. As mentioned earlier, the artworks are untitled, and everyone is free to see what they wish to see in Farrugia’s works.
The beautiful photos in this catalogue, taken by Andrew E. Zarb, capture these sculptures in incredible ways and angles. However, I think one must see them with his/her own eyes to fully comprehend the bravura in execution and the delicateness and grace that these works emanate. Farrugia managed to give the Maltese Globigerina Limestone the attention and importance that it deserves, especially when considering how it is being replaced by bricks and concrete nowadays.
The Curator Melanie Erixon holds a BA (Hons) in History of Art (Malta) and read for an MA in Museum & Heritage Management (Newcastle). She also attended various courses in curation at the Sotheby’s Art Institute.
She was part of the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale team for two editions, under the artistic direction of Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci. She produced and presented two radio show series on Campus FM, one about the Mdina Biennale, titled ‘Culture Vulture’ and the other one ‘Savoir Faire’ which tackled the subject of Design.
Her first experiences with exhibition curation were at STUDIO 104 (today DESKO), in Valletta, where she cocurated various exhibitions as part of her internship, with Michelle Morrissey.
From 2015 to 2018, she was the coordinator of the Strada Stretta Concept - a project under the auspices of the Valletta 2018 Foundation - where she oversaw around ninety cultural events throughout the years, including operas, fashion shows, concerts, poetry evenings, lectures, art exhibitions and theatre.
Erixon is the founder of the online gallery Art Sweven, which also provides a curation service. She is a freelance curator and currently also the resident curator at Il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, in Mqabba, where art exhibitions are hosted monthly. Erixon is extremely passionate about art and is also an avid collector of contemporary Maltese art.
The sculptor as a model of his passion
An artist does not borrow a “material”, but seeks a synthesis of many limestone material components, and makes them his own, or rather, he sculpts them in a shape that is only apparently abstract, without this containing an image of the external world: it makes it become an expression of its form.
The expression of these volumes are data, harmonies and plastic information that the viewer must grasp as reactions of the Maltese limestone, always combined with expression.
There could be many readings, interpretations that we find in the undulations of the sculpted “material”, but there is no need to “research”, our sensations should react in relation to the volumetric suggestions of the sculpture itself. All these forms do not have a scholastic authorship, they impose themselves, because they are the expression of the free thought aspect of our century, even of that strange previous “short” century, dedicated to abstraction, from Kandinsky onwards.
His choice comes from the ground, it goes up little by little, from a deep conviction, in this sense a “material” is not alone, but it is alive and accompanied by the form that suggests, envelops and seduces. Globigerina Limestone has a profound alchemy indeed. In fact, Antoine Farrugia does not abandon figuration, but reads it in a different
form, modulates it and revives it as a dynamic model of his way of expressing reality.
He assimilates the primary, ancestral form, as waves that do not have it and have never existed in the “figurative reproduction”; he proposes them as a deduction, all drawn from the primitive art of spontaneous manipulation, where on the walls, on the rock stones when they were distantly drawn and painted the “undular” shapes of nonexistent matter, such as wave motion, like the passage of clouds, indescribable, but he borrows them today, and brings them back to the “reality” of his form, like sacred texts painted on the walls, passing unscathed from one civilisation to another, from one century to another, as if to extract its true forms identifiable with his passion.
But the primitive values of the symbols have disappeared, to make the viewer follow the path, through its light and its shadows, without ever betraying the aesthetic concerns, but all extrapolated from literary, anthropomorphic and aesthetic meanings. As if to say: my way of sculpting is in “perfect correspondence” with painting, even if painting does not need sincerity, but truth, as Malevich said. Free forms and shadows that carry in themselves their deep meaning. How could volume and form repudiate the surrounding real space, given that it is the conditions of their existence at different rhythms.
To give up on three-dimensional space?
It doesn’t seem correct to me, because the space-time of reading Antoine Farrugia’s sculptures is animated, even if
the matter is apparently inanimate. Abstract sculpture is constantly threatened by the loss of recognition, evaluation and consideration as a “work of art”. There are many existing forms in nature - rock, marble, soil - that create and involve abstract forms and communicate the inevitable reference to creation. But creativity is something else.
The identity of the sculptor’s aspirations is evident, because he acts on forms, making them ethereal, subtle and spectacular, while remaining in the design dimensions, but they could take and grab from space: height and shape, made to grow in the creation of an infinite monument, almost as Brancusi had identified it.
Here the sculptor presents a series of NON conventional creations, more linked to his personality than to the material, an apparently spontaneous, almost childish revolution in presenting the pages of a notebook, made up of sheets held by a peg, as if to ridicule the material. It is no coincidence that its continuous flow of material makes one think of a sailor plowing the waves with his boat.
There where the academic school inserts him into the tradition of material knowledge, he cancels it, reinvents it, ridicules it, deprives it of weight, undulates it, makes it flow like a hand leafing through the pages of a book. Perhaps he misses the “Soirées de Paris”, where he could have conversed with Apollinaire, who would have thrilled him, and revealed the arcana of the calligrams, as if to insert them in his sheets, in his subtle materials ... as for a literary game, then loaned to a daring sculptor.
Farrugia’s art of sculpting is an experience that quickly becomes a simplification, according to which, for each work, there is only one correct way of reading it. And it is true that it is particularly important that the hypothesis becomes a work, in which we too can correctly discover our interpretation. Compared with the primitive or natural form, creative, abstract and conceptual sculpture takes on a unique meaning, unrepeatable and fundamentally consistent with the aesthetic result. Because the sculptor questions us, he makes us reflect on his simplifications. He sees the serenity of the evolutionary form, we entertain a relationship, sometimes musical, with those chromatic undulations, like vibrations of harmonious strings.
The artist’s intentions are very clear, because they are accompanied and determined by a logic linked to material, and therefore, he must make it speak, modify it, make it sing ... as Giacometti said of his thread-like figures.
Just because of his uniqueness, Farrugia possesses the spontaneous traits of a sculptor who makes matter speak. Intuitions play a fundamental role in the folds, in the twists, but above all in the folds of the “unspoken”, where the material suggestions make and tighten the rules for deciding how a sculpture can be perceived and read correctly. The intuitions are variables or rather: arbitrary forms to which the artist must give an interpretation, as an informed psychologist would do.
The serenity of the forms carved in the limestone cannot be perceived at a single glance, in a single moment, but must be seen “circularly”, in practice you have to
turn around the volume to discover all the aesthetic properties directly, because they have unexpected colours, lights and shadows, shapes in height, sounds and evocative rhythms. With the same coherence of a musical partition, without depending on the circumstances of their origins, the materials used are independent of their physical components, they are instruments that evoke a fundamental function, I would say almost “familiar” in their way of being peacefully exposed to light.
Because a sculpture by Farrugia always presents an infinity of identities, of specific characteristics linked to each other, but distinct, and never contradictory, because a shape can transform itself, take and acquire characteristics, and consequently, lose or acquire some specific identities for: an infinity of other sculptures, of other objects, but immutable in their limestone matter of origin.
The crystallisation of matter suggests still other interpretations, and from this observation: an evolution appears as a succession of volumes, which do not form a continuous line, but a world of objects, volumes and sculptures that take on a meaning, a dynamic form, as were the great formal innovations of abstract sculpture.
The form, carved, cut, or engraved in a metal plate, is inscribed as an identity, an apparently empty profile, the folded, curvilinear surface is a resonance of its volume, juxtaposed with another rounded metal find, which seems to form a cylinder, but it is empty, because it is placed lower by the lightness of the limestone material, by the acute choice of the artist, who sees and suggests its inner form.
The change represents the intervention in the plastic conception, and it is radical. The sculptural work can and must be the total representation of matter, of what the artist knows how to make his own, of that which lives autonomously because it is limitless. Sculpture, his sculpture, is practically limitless, because forms taken from nature are not present to explore the same material composition, but exist to detect, through its allusions, the tendencies of the artist’s feelings, passions and impulses.
From this context he detaches himself from the traditional sculptor, because he is nourished by the decorative and plastic richness of his native country, but at the same time he proposes himself differently for a more radical conquest: the conquest of space. The notion of a sense or content specific to forms is more natural in its vigorous, plastic and harmonious expression: each form is the external manifestation of a content. Despite the appearance, the forms of his sculptures are meditated, sculpted with the natural light of his desire, in the most expressive way of his inner content. Today there are very few artists who can be satisfied by containing pure abstract forms. Farrugia’s forms are too meditated to be defined as “imprecise” or abstract. Forms, volumes and musical resonances of the folds make their positive influence felt as a message of inner enrichment, where the translation movement is kept alive, imposing a more meditated than static, more sonorous than balanced will. They are a variegated species of reactive, acute and cutting forms all in space, close to the agitation of the beings that make up the limestone matter.
The compositions take and acquire a support, a base, a plinth that rests perpendicularly to and on the material, the extensions, the folds, the taut arrows of the diagonal surfaces are indications, and tentacular forms of “exit from the material”, performed and made to move away from weight, to express the flight of volumes, the torments of imagination.
His sculptures stand out as a language accessible to all, and we understand him, because in reality they are not physically weighted, heavy or referential sculptures, simply because they express the invisible, even if they bring us many concrete examples, apparently, they deceive us, they make us experience a world apart, the world of the artist.
We have rarely been able to see, devise and visit similar forms, we cannot mention other masters to indicate the particular path that our “sculptor” has taken, admitting that this definition may still be valid for his “sculptures”, because we are actually confronted with spatial volumes of unexpected range, as if to say: here it begins and here it ends!
When in reality we must well recognise that creativity is difficult to transmit, but here Antoine Farrugia takes us as witnesses, and makes us react: his proposals are valid, and we are happy to have discovered them, read them and with a somewhat presumptuous attempt, to have interpreted them. How could we have determined or interpreted those volumetric categories in which it is correct to perceive a work, an autonomous work, a work of art?
For us all the circumstances indicate to us that it is more correct to read, perceive and interpret a work of art in the category of pure inventions, where we do not see masters - kinetic sculpture, assuming that this definition can be applied to his sculptures - it is not pertinent, because the sculptor, without being such, possesses the qualities required to be considered as one who works “space” with volumes, and therefore closer to Rodin’s tradition rather than Picasso’s. Sculpture manner and categories, as well as music, are based on volumes, or notes that are known and practiced using hands, in daily life, in the same way our artist thinks and creates a work, produces it and presents it with the same human categories of knowledge, practice and intrinsic realisation, with the material he elaborates. It is therefore correct to think that the works presented here are real sculptures, and the resistance of this procedure is inherent in the passion that visually characterises a message formed with the hands through a project considered “without limits” and immersed in the artist’s life.
The sculptor becomes a model of his passion.
Untitled, 2017, Globigerina Limestone on Concrete, 55cm x 25cm
Untitled, 2017, Globigerina Limestone on Concrete, 55cm x 12cm
Untitled, 2017, Globigerina Limestone on Concrete, 55cm x 29cm
Untitled, 2017, Globigerina Limestone on Concrete, 55cm x 12cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Stainless Steel and Lava, 41.5cm x 8cm x 10cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Lava, 27cm x 46cm
Untitled, 2022, Coloured Globigerina Limestone on Stainless Steel and Lava, 22cm x 12cm x 70cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Stainless Steel and Lava, 61cm x 18cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Lava, 11cm x 45cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Lava, 11cm x 55cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Lava, 10cm x 46cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Lava, 11cm x 45cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Lava, 24cm x 46cm
Untitled, 2022, Polished Globigerina Limestone on Stainless Steel and Lava, 42cm x 46cm
Antoine Farrugia (b.1969) was born and lives in Mqabba, Malta. The artist’s primary driving force lies within the limestone medium; its various geological characteristics and pliability provides the momentum to give life to organic, undulating forms. An energy which transcends the material itself, resulting in a personal endeavour to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Such strength reverberates also in other materials, whether marble or steel, resulting in dynamic and monumental sculptures.
October 2003
‘Emotions in Stone’, Old Hospital, Mqabba, Malta
December 2004
Solo Exhibition, St. James Cavalier, Valletta, Malta
September 2009
Solo Exhibition during Notte Bianca, Valletta, Malta
April 2015
Solo Exhibition, Galleria del Borgo, Attard, Malta
June 2016
‘Il-Forma’, Marie Gallery 5, Mosta, Malta
January 2022
‘Xulliela Bajda’, il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, Mqabba, Malta
July 2005
‘Magiah’, Yacht Club Manoel Island, Malta
August 2005
‘STRADA’, Strait Street, Valletta, Malta
July 2006
Collective Exhibition at Malta Artfest, Freedom Square, Valletta, Malta
July 2006
‘STRADA’, Strait Street, Valletta, Malta
July 2007
‘STRADA’, Strait Street, Valletta, Malta
November 2008
‘Out of Print’, Ministry of Tourism, Valletta, Malta
October 2010
‘Mal-Mhedda Taż-Żmien’, Mqabba, Malta
October 2012
‘Mal-Mhedda Taż-Żmien’, Mqabba, Malta
October 2015
The Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale, Mdina, Malta
December 2015
Collective Exhibition, Chinese Garden Santa Lucia, Malta
September 2016
Collective Exhibition, Le Meridien Hotel, Balluta, Malta
December 2016
Collective Exhibition, Chinese Cultural Centre, Valletta, Malta
November 2017
The Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale, Mdina, Malta
March 2022
‘Art Interrupted’, Collective Exhibition, il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, Mqabba, Malta
June 2022
‘A Midsummer’s Red Dream’, Collective Exhibition, BOCO Boutique Hotel, Cospicua, Malta
October 2022
‘It’s 5 o’clock Somewhere’, Collective Exhibition, BOCO Boutique Hotel, Cospicua, Malta
October 2022
‘But I See Beauty’, Collective Exhibition, De Paule Hall, San Anton Palace, Attard, Malta
This exhibition is being held under the patronage of Hon. Anġlu Farrugia M.P. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Parliament of Malta
The Valletta Cultural Agency would like to thank Valerio Ballotta, GBK Malta Ltd.