I dreamt of a Honeycomb Village and woke up facing the Hornet Tower- Wallace Falzon

A new sculptural installation by Maltese artist Wallace Falzon, under the supervision of Giuseppe Schembri Borg Bonaci, has recently been erected. It is situated on the university ring road, thus in close proximity to what the artist describes as “our country’s thinking hub”.

A hornet alights on the top of the construction made of recycled steel and galvanised to prevent rusting.

Titled Hornet Tower, it looms like a memorial, a cenotaph to the building frenzy that has overwhelmed the country in the last few years.

Falzon comments on the change that Malta has witnessed, from its rather dreamy Mediterranean nature of the 1980s and 1990s to a veritable architectural mess, which has rendered it unrecognisable.

“The country has lost its spirit and its soul. There is no demarcation between one village and the next, it’s all a big unsightly sprawl of ugliness,” he says.

The idea behind this sculpture, reminiscent of the constructive work of American artist Louise Nevelson, had poetic origins.

“One night, I was dreaming of a honeycombed village where all streets have houses on two floors, as used to be predominant for our villages,” the artist says.

“I woke up from that dream to the sad, contemporary reality of inhuman towers, hence the title.”

The bubble of this false demand for property will, one day, burst

The hornet has been invading our summers, Falzon continues, decimating the bee population. This tower is its habitat, a suffocating invasion of boxes that have replaced all that was genuinely Maltese and that has metastasised into a scourge that we rather euphemistically regard as property.

“In the past, building one’s own home was a source of pride,” Falzon remarks, as there was a measure of competition between families to create a home to be proud of, with embellishments that add to its character.

The artist maintains that a false economy has been created, which entails a demand for accommodation to house foreign workers who have become cogwheels to turn this economy around. More of these workers are needed to feed this economic model, necessitating more apartments to be built fast and sacrificing the few open spaces on this altar of greed.

The bubble of this false demand for property will, one day, burst, he says, resulting in these persons departing; thus, the country will be saddled with boxy apartments at the cheap end of the real-estate spectrum that no one likes and which do not add anything to the Maltese architectural fabric.

“Recently, it was decided that we need nature and, thus, there was an attempt to fill vacant spaces in roads and between buildings with greenery. However, we have lost the real thing, we have sacrificed the real environment,” the artist points out.

He believes that there is a collective comprehension, maybe nostalgic in origin, that goes beyond political affiliation; this exercise is too little, too late.

Another work of his, Honeycomb Village, can be considered as a companion piece to Hornet Tower. It relates to the traditional Maltese village, still unmolested by so-called progress.

Honeycomb Village

“I used warm honey hues in bronze and copper, suggesting the tonalities of the picture-perfect houses that used to adorn our streets in the past,” Falzon says.

It used to be customary for the house-proud owners to open their front doors during village festas, bringing the inside out while tourists snapped photos happily, capturing what Maltese living was all about.

Those were real homes, whereas, nowadays, we are living in spaces that cannot strictly be defined as houses, he continues. People are eager to get out of these spaces of confinement as one is constantly submitted also to noise, imprisoned by the limited dimensions of the rooms and subjected to all sort of pollution. They have no open spaces as properties with gardens carry huge price tags, unaffordable to most members of the new generation.

“Can this sad reality be reversed?,” Falzon muses.

“I believe that it is too late for this but, at least, we should do our utmost to conserve the little that’s left. Art can be a way to deliver this message. Nostalgia is a strong emotion  but we should transcend that,” he says.