Art Explora Festival offers a journey all around the Mediterranean Sea
This Thursday, Art Explora, an art festival with a difference, arrives in Malta – surprisingly, by catamaran! A 47-foot museum boat, moored in Valletta until March 31, is the centrepiece of the event and Valletta is its inaugural stop on a two-year cultural Odyssey during which it will visit 15 countries and cities from Lisbon to Beirut.
“It’s a source of great pride that Malta is the first docking place on Art Explora’s journey around the Mediterranean,” says Daniel Azzopardi, festival curator and artistic director of Spazju Kreattiv, which has programmed a series of festival events ranging from panel discussions to circus performances in a festival village at the Valletta Waterfront alongside the catamaran.
“In addition to catering for local audiences and promoting Maltese artists, Spazju Kreattiv aims to strike up collaborations with international
Azzopardi continues.
“We’re keen to establish ourselves and Malta on the international map for creative innovation, and to bring top artists here from elsewhere in the partners,” world, particularly with interesting projects like Art Explora that engage the wider community with the arts.”
Inside the inventive nomadic exhibition space (which can accommodate 2,000 people a day in booked timed slots), visitors will find an immersive exhibition,
Présentes, designed in collaboration with Paris’ Musée du Louvre, and a soundscape experience by
Centre Pompidou’s Ircam.
Présentes includes an audiovisual journey of discovery using headsets (with translations in English, Maltese and other European and Mediterranean languages). This immersive experience reflects upon the history of the Mediterranean as seen through selected pieces from the Louvre directly associated with the region.
“The museum boat is an unprecedented way to explore the Musée du Louvre’s collections,” explains Azzopardi, “and this is not simply a digital representation of a conventional museum. Instead, pieces are placed in the landscapes and stories of people from ancient civilisations. There’s a particular focus on highlighting female figures from the past, and space for contemporary voices too. It truly is a one-of-a-kind experience.”
Included in the collection, for example, is a stone tablet held at the Louvre dating back to the Babylonian era on which a poem was written by the high priestess Enheduanna praising the great Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.
Visitors to the catamaran can also take a sonic odyssey as they listen to a soundscape, recorded
over a two-month period, that weaves together the sounds of the sea, both imaginary and real, from urban and natural spaces, reflecting the richness and diversity of a region with many languages and cultures along its coastlines.
“During the day, there are also daily workshops on the catamaran for children on their Easter holidays and their families,” Azzopardi says, “and then in the evening, there are performances on the main stage in the festival village with international artists from across the Mediterranean region. These range from concerts, think tanks and dance to circus artists including NUYE, an award-winning Spanish troupe of acrobats who are the first evening event of the festival.”
They are also hosting awardwinning Afro-Soul singer-songwriter Tsungai Tsikirai, who puts a contemporary twist on traditional Zimbabwean music.
“Although Zimbabwe is not in the Mediterranean region,” he adds, “the geopolitics in subSaharan Africa is very relevant to the today.”
As well as events by headliners Etnika, Justin Adams, Davide Ambrogio, Smadj, Claire Tonna, Brikkuni, KorMalta and ŻfinMalta, audiences can also look forward to the premiere of Swedish arthouse film Exodus by award-winning director Abbe Hassan on March 31.
Hassan was born in Lebanon and escaped from war-torn Beirut with his family as a child. It’s a warm-hearted story of survival and friendship as a peoplesmuggler ‘goes rogue’: he has a change of heart and helps a 12year-old girl find her family.
The first weekend of the festival (March 22-24) also includes an
Mediterranean context ‘Ocean Weekend’ programme in collaboration with maltabiennale.art on the theme of ‘Can you sea? The Mediterranean as a political body’.
This includes discussion events, film screenings, and inspiring talks, gathering key speakers from the art and science worlds around the issue of ocean climate emergencies.
At Spazju Kreattiv itself, there are also two exhibitions associated with the festival. The first is Melita− ,mlṭ, refuge, an exhibition by French photographer Anne Immelé who was inspired by the traces of Phoenician civilisations she found on visits to caves throughout the islands and the contemporary migratory crisis in the Mediterranean. Considering the fate of the Mediterranean by crossing the Phoenicians’ routes of commercial conquest with those of today’s migrants, her pictures reflect upon the ruins in Malta, Palermo in Sicily and Carthage in Tunisia. The exhibition goes beyond reportage, providing a thought-provoking and poetic perspective on both these old sites and the people who live there now, many of whom are migrants, and their stories.
The second is Dream[of ]Land, an intriguing interdisciplinary exhibition, curated by Elyse Tonna and Sarah Chircop, weaving together different artists’ dreams of the land, its past and its present, in which the materials used to create each of the curious pieces in the show are grounded in the land itself.
For more information on the Art Explora festival visit kreattivita.org.
This page is supported by Arts Council Malta.