Artist has ‘vertical picnic’ on Marsa green wall

A visual artist has held what he calls a “vertical picnic” on the green wall on the Marsa-Ħamrun bypass, deadpanning that he struggled to find a horizontal green space for a regular picnic.

Motorists stuck in traffic on the bypass may have noticed Keit Bonnici perched atop a ladder, draped in a checkered red and white outfit resembling a picnic blanket.  

In a tongue-in-cheek post on Instagram, Bonnici said his installation, entitled Sunset Picnic, “reimagines what being nature could look like. The work displaces the quintessentially horizontal social practice of picnicking onto vertical architectural planes.” 

The original green wall along the 350-metre stretch of road was inaugurated in a blaze of publicity in late 2020, at a cost of €650,000. However, it was then abandoned, before being reinstalled last March. 

Keit enjoying the view along the Marsa bypass. Photo: Keit Bonnici

“This act of vertical relocation problematizes the scarcity of local ground-level green commons and suggests a relationship with verticality within the urban context defined by spatial fragmentation and environmental precarity,” Bonnici wrote. 

Speaking to Times of Malta, Bonnici said he believed there was a lack of green spaces in Malta.

"I found this vertical decorative wall and decided to transform it into a public space," he said.

Bonnici is no stranger to thought-provoking performance art. In 2023, he climbed on top of and walked across the metal barriers that separate parliament from Freedom Square in Valletta, in a performance highlighting the fragility of democracy. The barriers were put in place during protests in 2019 related to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. 

The performance was shown at an exhibition in Vienna. 

In 2024, he contributed a piece entitled Fuq L-Art to the Malta Biennale. The installation involved bubble-wrapping and tightly securing one of Valletta’s iconic red telephone boxes, as a commentary on decolonisation and the evolving role of monuments in public spaces. 

Bonnici claimed the artwork was censored, after it was removed without his consent and stored for a month in an undisclosed location.