Ale’s Project centres around Alessia, a 16-year-old pianist and budding performer on the autism spectrum. It endeavours to explore alternative modes of communication and creativity – through the lens of Alessia’s powerful connection to music – via a short film and a series of workshops in educational institutions.

Alessia’s talent and passionate engagement with music are the inspiration behind this project. As a teenager with autism, she connects with music in a distinct way, expressing it through a vast world of lived experiences that she is unable to express verbally.

This project aims to communicate Alessia’s unique relationship to music through the making of a short film based on her performance of a short piano concerto by Russian Composer Ilia Chkolnik. In so doing it aspires to celebrate her multiple abilities while respectfully acknowledging her challenges.

A team of professional artists collaborated with Alessia via a method of communication that relied on radical openness and the shedding of power relations. Through a series of carefully designed research sessions, the team empowered Alessia with a range of tools that promoted the use of non-verbal expression, and applied Alessia’s creative outputs into the production design of the short film.

By exploring Alessia’s narrative via alternative methods of creative production this project not only brought more visibility to the reality of persons with disability, but also empowered Alessia to take agency within the process and develop a project which authentically reflects her identity, talent, dreams and aspirations as a musician.

By breaking down the walls of otherness and utilising difference as an opportunity for fruitful engagement, the collaborative space opened up by Ale’s Project resulted in modes of being together which were rooted in care, attention, safety, security, sensitivity, preparedness, reliability, focus, honesty, and transparency.

This approach to artistic collaboration and the creative method underlying Ale’s Project are being disseminated to a wider audience through a program of workshops and events. These workshops are currently being run in secondary schools and at MCAST as well as within Opening Doors, Spazju Kreattiv, and other institutions.

The act of bringing together under the aegis of non-normativity and heterogeneity challenges ableist ideologies that produce all the labels which are traditionally attached to persons with disability.

On Ale’s Project, the voiceless are not only encouraged to speak, but they are also empowered to claim their own space and draw others into it. It explores the idea of ‘giving a voice’ by re-ordering the process of artistic collaboration in what may be perceived as a political act, which in and of itself proposes new ways of thinking, doing, and being.

The film will be premiered to a select audience on December 12 at the Valletta Campus Theatre in Valletta and will be launched online on December 21. For more information, one can log on to https://www.facebook.com/AlessiasProject