Art alive (and kicking) at Tal-Qroqq festivals

High Cultural Season in Malta, as one might call it, comes to an end this week with a jazz performance in which you (or at least your voice) will be taking part directly. Although not in the role of performer, you also share some responsibility in the organisation of the Arts Festival, the Jazz Festival and Evenings on Campus. Do you feel happy about how they went so far?

I am looking forward to Tuesday’s concluding event, ‘Reading Mediterraneo’ at the Atriju Vassalli, on the University Campus, perhaps the segment of Malta to which I am most affectionately tied.

This event takes me back nostalgically to the post-Independence years, when the spirit that broke out in Paris and then spread throughout universities and the world in 1968, was anticipated in Malta.

Public recitals relaying the great outburst of poetry in contemporary dress that occurred in those years were often accompanied by jazz performances. As a rule, in all these splendid although ephemeral occasions, there was some conceptual relationship between the poems and the music. The two arts were hardly ever really intertwined.

On the contrary, in the ‘Reading Mediterraneo’, the versatile Italian actress, Biancamaria Stanzani Ghedini, who will be not so much be reciting as acting out the poems, will fuse the words into an integrated sound texture with the music.

Besides Massimo De Majo, who teaches in the Music Studies course at the University, as percussionist, and Dominic Galea at the piano, there will be a world-famous master of the saxophone, Thomas Agergaard, from Denmark, and Flavio Piantoni on bass.

The poems chosen illustrate the not always pacific sea mentioned in the name given to the multimedia celebration. Its original and complex composition also includes video and visual inputs by Vince Briffa, an expert in the exploration of identity and ‘otherness’. The polyphonic structure of the performance in itself reflects the encounters rife with the richness and pain between the cultures on its opposite shores.

The trilingual mode of expression of the lyrics, all by Maltese poets, highlights the crossroads identity of our islands. The Gozo-born poet John Cremona, still much better known as a legal luminary than as the initiator of 20th–century verbal art in Malta, himself has written excellent idiomatic poetry in all three languages (Maltese, Italian and English). Maria Grech Ganado, like Joe Friggieri, has written excellently both in Maltese and English, and also re-created Immanuel Mifsud’s idiosyncratic, quasi-surrealist fantasies in English translation.

The Danish input, which this year recaptured the authentic atmosphere set at its beginning by Charles City Gatt, will give a Euro-Mediterranean touch to the whole and even, because it is jazz, the flavour of a planetary awareness.

The ‘Reading Mediterraneo’ is the fitting conclusion of this year’s Evenings on Campus. Do you propose any suitable epitaph for this year’s Arts Festival?

For an obvious reason, I appreciate above all the concluding event of the ‘visual art project’ called Spaces and subtitled ‘Thinking Strait’. The reason, of course, is my passionate devotion to the rebirth of Strait Street as a pilot ‘creative cluster’ at the very heart of Valletta – where I was born and where I still rejoice having to walk despite the perils to neuropathic feet, such as mine, presented by the streets in the process of being re-paved.

Lisa Gwen Baldacchino proved herself to be a most enterprising curator. Together with two established artists, Anton Grech and Ruth Bianco, she invited three artists unknown to me, Sean Gabriel Ellul, Fabrizio Ellul and James Micallef Grimaud, to present, in almost miraculously recuperated spaces in Strait Street itself, a kaleidoscopic set of evocations of the street’s past. My hope is for the space to remain a foundation step in the process of realising the Strait Street dream.

The concluding event brought together, with the visual installations, six poems in verse or prose, all in their very different ways related to Strait Street. There is a clear analogy in the twinning of verbal and visual images as the last station of the Arts Festival with that of verbal and musical images in the forthcoming Evenings on Campus. In both, literature comes to the fore as the art through which the search and reconstruction of identity is most explicitly pursued.

Another exercise in the same genre was instigated in Cospicua by a relatively new and bold Horizons. This publication again highlights the conjunction of new voices with those of veterans of the 1960s, such as Albert Marshall and Mario Azzopardi.

One of the most intriguing in the continuing stream of questions addressed to you for more explanation of your ideas about Gozo as eco-island is: What would you put in the chapter on culture and the arts?

The pretty obvious answer is promotion of the genre that, at least since the 1960s, has been called ‘environmental art’.

It ranges from the early so-called earthworks (where the site is an aspect of the work, a part of nature constituting a part of the aesthetic object) to the more recent ‘eco-conventions’ from the 1980s (less monumental, but aiming to enhance perception of nature’s forces, processes and phenomena).

Some internationally established masters of the genre could be invited to contribute, as well as such world-class Gozo born artists, such as Austin Camilleri, who are well able to develop their own individual idiolect in this contemporary artistic genre.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.