Cultural Regeneration through Urban Spaces and Places

The effects of a European Capital of Culture are felt through both the cultural activities that take place and through the interactions people have with each other as well as the space around them in their everyday lives.

The Valletta 2018 Foundation has been working tirelessly on several projects preparing Valletta for its title as European Capital of Culture in Malta in 2018. More so, it is researching how these projects are changing the lives of people.

These interactions between communities and their surrounding space are key issues being investigated by the Valletta 2018 Evaluation & Monitoring research process. This is a five-year research study examining the impacts of the European Capital of Culture on Malta’s society and economy.

Dr Antoine Zammit, with the Valletta 2018 Foundation, has been studying the relationship between community inclusion and space in cultural infrastructural projects. His research focuses on four specific infrastructural projects taking place in Valletta as part of the European Capital of Culture: The Valletta Design Cluster (il-Biċċerija) and its surrounding neighbourhood; Strait Street; the relocation of MUŻA – Mużew Nazzjonali tal-Arti (Malta’s National Museum of Fine Arts) – to Auberge d’Italie and Pjazza de Valette; and the area surrounding the Valletta Covered Market (is-Suq tal-Belt).

The four projects are in different stages of their implementation, and have been dispersed throughout Valletta in a way that allows them to collide with many of the different districts of the capital. While none lack cultural significance, each project has displayed different strengths in implementation. The Valletta Market and Strait Street Projects have a particularly strong commercial value, while the Valletta Design Cluster is aimed at creative design and encouraging entreprenuership. MUŻA, more overtly than any of the other three projects, is an attempt at traditional forms of cultural engagement and regeneration through the development of a national, community-driven musuem of art. Zammit, together with two M.Arch. (Architecture and Urban Design) students—Daniel Attard and Christopher Azzopardi—carried out extensive studies to gain a deeper understanding of the sites.

“Quality urban design has increasingly become about creating these habitable places. It is ultimately all about the quality of life of residents.”

Attard developed a matrix in order to score the different types of interactions within each site. Split into categories such as ‘aural’, ‘user categories’ and ‘actual use of space,’ the sections help identify emerging patterns and traits from the implementations of the projects. The Biċċerija and Strait Street all score high in the ‘aural’ category, meaning various elements that contributed to noise, or the lack of it, were observed. MUŻA and the Covered Market both qualified for the ‘user categories’ section, meaning that a relatively diverse demographic was observed making use of the place. The Valletta Design Cluster was noted for having a higher level of human interaction take place daily (balcony conversations, loud conversations in general, and so on). Finally, all four sites qualified for the category of ‘actual use of space,’ meaning that people actively show awareness of the space by taking photos, complaining due to lack of public conveniences, construction work, and shops setting up or closing down, among other things.

On the other hand, Azzopardi focused on the spatial quality of the sites by looking at their accessibility and permeability, perception and comfort, and the vitality of the four sites. Of the four, Strait Street, more specifically the intersection with Old Theatre Street, scored highest, followed by MUŻA and the Valletta  Market. The Valletta Design Cluster obtained the lowest score, suggesting that the site in its current state is poorly perceived and somewhat inaccessible. Matching Azzopardi’s findings with statistical data, obtained at a neighbourhood level through the NSO’s evaluation of the available 2011 Census Data, Zammit has determined some relationship (but not statistically significant), between the buildings’ current state of repair and the community’s achievements in literacy, education, and employment.

Museum of the People

Naqsam il-MUŻA is a branch project inspired by MUŻA. Currently in progress, participants in the Naqsam il-MUŻA project were selected from different communities around Malta and taken to see the art collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts. They will then exhibit their choice of artwork from the museum in their localities. It brings the museum to the people, rather than the other way round.

The diversity of the four sites were key to Zammit’s studies. He studied the effect their differing cultural infrastructure had on the cultural regeneration of Valletta. ‘Cultural infrastructure entails those interventions, which generally have some kind of physical implication, in an urban space which tends to enhance and broaden people’s cultural appreciation,’ explains Dr Zammit, ‘but I see it as requiring an added value. In my opinion, art for art’s sake in these cases doesn’t mean anything. Which is why the question which I try to answer in my research is, “what will that infrastructure give back to the community at the end of it all?”’ Other research, similar to Zammit’s, holds that more than just creating spaces, cultural regenerative projects should aim to create places which result from quality urban design. ‘Over the past two years, I started to realise that the real difference is ‘between places that are alive, versus habitable places,’ comments Zammit, who thinks that, ‘quality urban design has increasingly become about creating these habitable places. It is ultimately all about the quality of life of residents.’ This issue of liveability is key to being a European Capital of Culture. Its goals are to create high-quality cultural and artistic activities while improving the quality of life of communities through culture. Zammit’s study highlights many potential issues such as an increase in noise pollution, gentrification resulting from a rise in property values and rental prices, and other potential impacts on Valletta residents. The Valletta 2018 Foundation is discussing these issues in its upcoming conference Cities as Community Spaces in November 2016, which will bring together a number of international speakers to explore how different communities make use of public spaces for creativity, contestation, and interaction. 

For more: valletta2018.org

Traders of Osaka

BoardGame-Review

I’m an absolute sucker for elegance. I love games with few components and rules, yet still manage to create a deep and thoughtful gameplay system. The card game Traders of Osaka has all of these traits.

Based on Traders of Carthage, where the goal is for players to move ships, and deliver goods from Alexandria to Carthage, Traders of Osaka is essentially the same but this time the gameplay is set in a new continent and era, with the cargo needing to be shipped from Osaka to Edo in Japan.

The game has both cards and a board. Each card has a number and colour. The colour denotes the type of goods you can ship, and the number indicates their value. But, the game gives you the choice to keep your card in hand or place it in front of you. This turns them into purchased goods or cash to use later to purchase the goods.

Apart from this choice, as a trader you need to move your goods. Each time you buy an item, the ship of its colour moves one step closer to its destination. When it reaches Edo the player can sell the goods of a specific colour. However, if the seas are perilous just before docking, it sinks, and everyone’s goods of that colour go to waste.

The setup leads to a very simple, binary choice, which is affectd by the actions of all the players around you. The competition is absolutely bittersweet. Don’t be fooled by its spareness, these are some of the most tactical choices you will have to make in your life.

The game is about trading rice in Osaka over 100 years ago—a hard sell. But it has beautiful artworks, and a modern design that runs smoothly and is easy to learn. Trust me, give this one a shot.

Pather Panchali (Song of the Road)

Film-Review_charlo

filmreview02Satyajit Ray’s monumental Pather Panchali deals with an impoverished family in rural Bengal. Maybe monumental isn’t the right word for this humble movie and yet, it is apt because of the film’s intense depiction of human emotions and its towering position in Indian cinema.

This is Satyajit Ray’s first film and the first in a trilogy depicting Apu’s coming of age and a family’s fateful descent into misfortune while the father works in the city. Adapted from Bibhutibhushan Banerji’s novel of the same name, it reproduces many of the episodes from the book. However, it commands pacing, cinematography, and performance which make it a distinguishable work in its own right and a prime example of India’s transcendental take on Italian Neorealist cinema (c. 1944–1952), which was based on serious concerns and social realism.

The director has a keen eye for establishing natural pacing devices—from gathering storms to flitting mosquitoes—accompanied by Ravi Shankar’s sitar music. In a celebrated scene, the mother is unable to communicate to the father that their daughter Durga died from a cold; the mother’s cries are replaced by wailing sitar notes. The shot remains helplessly ‘immobilised’ as the anguished father rises out of the camera’s view, then returns helplessly to it.

The film’s pacing alternates between quiet, domestic chores and vibrant, exterior episodes in which Apu and Durga behave as children do. Much like the source novel and the Mangal-Kāvya poems in Bengali literature (made up of episodic poems called panchali), it is the periodic nature of rural life which drives the film forward. Although it differs from commercial western narratives, with their linear cause-effect plots and clear resolution, the film made its way to western audiences winning the Best Human Document award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival (among many others).

Of note is the film’s excellent black and white cinematography, which brings out the bright blaze of India’s heat and the silvery tones of the monsoon habitat to crystalline, elemental palpability. The recent Blu-ray release eliminates the ‘ghosting’ effect and muddy transfers of previous VHS or DVD releases.

Finally, one cannot imagine Pather Panchali without the actress Chunibala Devi, who plays the aged widowed aunt. The moment she comes to realise that she is no longer wanted in the household, convinces me that the medium close-up was invented for this moment in film history.

When I met Satyajit Ray’s son in Calcutta, he gifted me with an original poster of the film. A Bollywood producer present in the same room leapt up for it. That poster made it through the monsoon (unlike Durga) and Pather Panchali continues to win hearts across the world. It is in this spirit that this review was written—with the hope that a work from a different time and so close to the human spirit, could become something personal for the readers of THINK.

Charting space and time

From Google Maps to Pokémon GO, without maps the world would not function. But how did we start developing them? Ritienne Gauci and Dr William Zammit take a look at historical maps to discover fascinating quirks about the Maltese Islands. So how were map errors inherited? And what is the connection between religion and maps?

Continue reading

Science, art, academia: Star Trek

The Star Trek academic symposium will be held at the Faculty of ICT, University of Malta, on 15 and 16 July 2016. This event will be a platform for both academics from various disciplines as well as Star Trek fans to meet and explore the intersection between the humanities and the sciences. There will be inspirational presentations from national and international speakers, with the programme tailored to attract a wide audience. Contributors will be encouraged to explore contemporary issues in medicine, science, and technology as well as philosophical, psychological, and sociological issues connected with the science fiction entertainment franchise Star Trek.

A similar symposium was held in 2014 and which proved to be a worldwide first that successfully drew participation from many international scholars including American philosopher Jason Eberl, UK-based neonatologist and ethicist Neena Modi.

As a result of its success, this second event that marks the 50th anniversary from the launch of Star Trek: The Original Series is being organised. The event will be held under the auspices of the Humanities, Medicine and Sciences Programme (HUMS), a University of Malta programme set up to explore and encourage the interfaces between the humanities, medicine, and sciences. The Science Fiction Symposium will appeal to scientists and fans of science fiction alike..

For more information, visit the website.

Transform everything

Digital technology opens up new possibilities for the visual arts. It allows artists to go beyond the traditional constraints of art. Sculpture is a centuries-old tradition reliant on the relationship between the artefact, and its material and space around it. In the past, sculpture was confined to being a physical act; it produced three-dimensional tangible objects that had little to do with the digital world.

M-Galea--Jan-2016-3
Matthew Galea

But this is just one side, if you would forgive the pun, to sculpture. Sculpture can be viewed as a mental process. It is the act of remediating things, or rather reassigning meaning to objects. Marcel Duchamp’s infamous sculpture ‘Fountain’ (1917) is perhaps a perfect example of this. Meaning is a social and cultural construct created through interactions by people with the objects and their environment. Since meaning is fabricated by society, then it stands to reason how the same objects have held multiple interpretations through time.

Matthew Galea (supervised by Dr Vince Briffa) explored these social and cultural constructs to create novel artworks. To do so, he employed skills from different disciplines including drawing, painting, sculpture, music, and the other performing arts. But instead of expressing them individually he fused them into one art form. The various art forms could be experienced collectively, for example, as a musical instrument, or a painting, or even through movement.

The multidisciplinary approach also allowed Galea to investigate chemistry and physics as ways of generating content and engaging with the artefact. Galea produced an art installation that made use of the night sky, which itself has held multiple interpretations by humankind throughout time. The artwork transformed movement into audio and visual content.

Thanks to his research, Galea helped show how hyperdisciplinary artefacts that fuse various art forms are possible through digital technology. Computers can transform data into an image, audio, or text. Software can transform anything. Digital technology can enhance artworks’ interactivity with the audience, making visitors part of the artwork.

To see the project’s outcome visit the website.

This research was performed as part of a Master of Fine Art in Digital Art which Matthew Galea completed at the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences (MaKS), University of Malta. It is partially funded by Master it! scheme. This scholarship is part-financed by the European Union—European Social Fund (ESF) under Operational Programme II—Cohesion Policy 2007–2013, ‘Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life’.

Modern European sculpture

French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is the progenitor of modern sculpture. He rebelled against idealised forms in order to express the inner truths of humanity in his artworks. His successors went on to challenge his work, continuing to explore the aesthetic revolution he had started. Key examples include Henry Moore (1898–1986), Alberto Giacometti and the largely undiscovered Swiss sculptor Hans Josephsohn (1920–2012).

Josef Kalleya, L'Abbandono della Casa Materna. Photograph of lost work (image courtesy of the Kalleya Family Archives)
Josef Kalleya, L’Abbandono della Casa Materna. Photograph of lost work (image courtesy of the Kalleya Family Archives)

These artists were studied alongside Maltese sculptor Josef Kalleya (1898–1998) at the conference entitled ‘Peripheral Alternatives to Rodin in Modern European Sculpture’ (December, 2015). The international speakers created significant links between works by renowned sculptors and Kalleya, who has been poorly understood by his contemporaries and is unknown outside Malta. Kalleya developed unique methods of creating photomontages alongside the innovative use of a knife to create powerful visceral incisions as a means of moulding his sculptures. He managed to create a new aesthetic.

The conference brought scholars from all over Europe to discuss these and other European sculptors. The scholars debated topics from the mutation of the human form to an artist’s sense of heritage. The event focused on pioneering sculptors who went beyond their current socio-political context. It also helped place Malta’s own Kalleya deservedly on the international map.

The conference and exhibition were organised by the Department of History of Art, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta. The events were convened by Dr Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and curated by Nikki Petroni. Other participants included Dr Sophie Biass-Fabiani (Musée Rodin, Paris), Dr Jon Wood (Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds), Barbara Vujanović (Atelijer Meštrović, Zagreb), Dr Julia Kelly (Loughborough University), and Ulrich Meinherz (Kesselhaus Josephsohn, St Gallen).