What was the whole point?

So it took place, the crowds turned up, and the fanatics who clap and shout in front of every statue were multiplied four-fold. And the statues of the four festas in Valletta, lined up in front of the Palace, made a striking image. But can anyone explain what was the whole point of the Festa l-Kbira, billed as a star celebration of the Valletta Capital City of Culture 2018?

Someone must have got the idea of ‘let’s get all the statues together in one place for Valletta 18’. But that’s precisely what was so wrong with the concept.

Each statue is the focal point of the annual celebration in each parish. Each parish is a community, structured around the parish church, with its celebrations, both joyous and sad (as in funerals). To melt down the divisions and mix ‘n match the parishes so as to obliterate the distinctions and create, as the name implied, a ‘festa kbira’ means to go back in history to the time when

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Valletta was one parish. Only, there was never this time, for Valletta has always been at least two parishes, each with its history and its social milieu.

Valletta is one community as the local council goes, and probably in support of the local football team, but its attractiveness lies in the different communities coalescing around the parish church and festa. To bring all the statues together in one celebration is equivalent to reducing the various differences and the richness associated with the different parishes and communities and reducing them to one agglomeration.

It is not adding one ‘Festa Kbira’: it is reducing all four different celebrations to one ‘Festa Kbira’.

And anyway, what is the business of the government and its agency to interfere in the life of the parishes and the communities?

Some may argue that the priests themselves, even the archbishop himself, were visibly happy to be involved and to be present. But then, they would, wouldn’t they? In the years to come they may come to rue allowing in this thin wedge of government interference.

Just as the celebration of the beginning of the year as Capital City of Culture, which we had praised, turned out to consist in the importation of foreign artists and companies, so too this celebration of the ‘Festa l-Kbira’ turns out to be no innovation at all but another ‘cut & paste’ exercise taken from another institution rather than something really original. So we ask: when will we finally get something original to mark the year?

We had long suspected that the people behind Valletta 18 have no idea what a Capital City of Culture is like and three and a half months down the year we are seeing our suspicion confirmed.

There are still eight and a half months to go and we challenge Valletta 18 to prove us wrong in the coming months.