Ann Dingli meets SOFIA BALDI PIGHI, artistic director for the inaugural edition of the international arts event, ahead of the opening.

Malta’s first art biennale – maltabiennale.art – will open officially on March 13. It is, in many senses, already open. As of one week ahead of its private launch, several of its 21 sites lay exposed as destinations-in-waiting, in varying stages of construction, as though prepped for open surgery with both the flesh of art itself and its installation instruments spread out wantonly for passers-by to examine void of context.

This strange accessibility is symptomatic of two main things – the size of the islands and consequently how embedded the sites are within public life ­– and the newness of staging an event of this scale. There is no hoarding, no retractable barriers, no discernible assembly spectacle – artworks are subtly being erected in between coffee stops and pavement conversations. 

During this culminating set-up week, I’m guided through a haphazard tour of two of the work-in-progress Valletta venues – the Main Guard and Grand Master’s Palace.

The latter is where the ‘Matri-archive of the Mediterranean’, one of the main four themes of the biennale, is partly hosted, along with the National Library – its location of choosing supporting a counter perspective to longstanding patriarchal archival conventions. This morning-long touring excursion sheds light on the frantic pace and lack of oxygen characterising the current life of the curatorial team. It’s no longer weeks but days until 80 artists from 23 nations will exhibit work to a promoted theme of “baħar abjad imsaġar taż-żebbuġ (white sea olive groves)”.

Fort St Elmo Courtyard panoramic. Photo: Daniel Cilia

This esoteric language extends to most of the event’s promotional literature. It takes two or three readings to understand what the theme of the biennale really means or is trying to interrogate. In person and in real conversations, however, the curators’ vision feels sharper.

Ahead of the opening, their team is scattered around the islands, oft spotted in fleeting motion between venues – either in person or within a handful of behind-the-scenes biennale Instagram feeds. Sofia Baldi Pighi, the event’s artistic director, is very much part of this cast of frenetic workers. I encounter her first at one of the venues, large canvas in hand, and next, days later at a nearby coffee shop.

“As of April, I decided to live here. In my practice, I’ve understood how important it is that before trying to describe a place, you have to feel it”.

This curatorial trajectory feels clean and complete

Baldi Pighi hails from Milan, having worked on a healthy collection of art events globally – perhaps most significantly as part of the curatorial team for the first Italian National Pavilion – Che cosa sogna l’acqua quando dorme? – within the 14th Gwangju biennale in South Korea.

I ask her about the genesis of the Malta biennale – which has, apparently, been in the country’s cultural ether for many years – and what her starting point was when surveying potential exhibitors and participants.

Ġgantija Archaeological Park

“I started by looking at [Heritage Malta’s] locations. I began by thinking – how shall I react to these spaces? Because [none] of them are neutral, we don’t have [any] white cubes at all. So that, of course, has changed my way of approaching artists – because it’s very specific.

“For me, it’s not just a matter of morphology and how to react to a space, but also has to do with a social point-of-view. For example, one of the first things I asked Heritage Malta was, after having seen all the sites, who is your public? I asked to see the ticket numbers, and to see who the people are that are buying a ticket to go to [these] sites. And as you can imagine, more than 85 per cent are tourists.

“So, I thought that my role as mediator should be to try address a disconnection between Maltese and [their] own heritage. I also can relate, because as an Italian, I know that feeling. So, I asked – how can we relate with the community that lives surrounding the cultural heritage? How can I bring the Maltese to the biennale?”

Baldi Pighi elaborates on what this looks like in practice. The biennale’s web of sites is supported by a public programme, which will run from March 13 until May 31 and will include three events per week.

These will range from lecture and talks related to the academic collateral that Baldi Pighi has mustered around the event but will also include community-facing workshops.

“This is something that is part of my practice, because I also studied pedagogy of art. And so, we decided to consider workshops that start from the artworks themselves”. 

Grand Master’s Palace. Photo: Steven Psaila

This curatorial trajectory feels clean and complete. Through Baldi Pighi’s conviction, the biennale’s pillar exhibits begin in relation to place. The art then finds ground for either provocation or mere commentary. The public programme brings people to the art, and consequently, back to place. It’s poised to work, and with the breadth and calibre of exhibitors, it all bodes quite well.

The shape of that calibre encompasses a range of work, from Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s installation, Garden of Scars, at Ġgantija Temples in Gozo, which looks at the archaeology of time, to Mexican artist Pedro Reyes’ Artist Against the Bomb social sculpture, also in Gozo.

From the Italian collective Post Disaster, who stage informed conversations about urban topics, and whose work will occupy space at Fort St Elmo, to the work of Maltese artist Nina Gerada, whose Goddess Project, which is six years in the making, comprises miniature sculptures of female bodies that evoke the emblematic mara l-ħoxna and summon a re-personification of the female psyche.

In theory, this biennale is working to a democratic agenda, resisting the parade of otherness that is frequently a symptom of city-wide art events (in this case, nation-wide). In the run-up to the show, however, a disconnect still exists between the content of the biennale and its dialogue with people on the street.

This may purely be a matter of communications – a symptom of overstretched administration duties that comes with the territory of operational newness.

I discuss this at length with Baldi Pighi – the mechanics, diplomatic weaving, and internal competitiveness that comes with delivering an event of this scale, in a country foreign to one’s own, and within a system steeped in idiosyncratic politics.

Only time will tell if this translates to success

This, of course, would be the case with any other context, and Baldi Pighi is very sensitive to the soft power she knows can be wielded through art and cultural production.

She discusses this with me in light of my concern around what I deem to be somewhat misty visibility of the biennale with the wider Maltese public, versus its intended international image, and in spite of a curatorial ambition to resonate locally.   

Yet as the week matures, the pomp and graphic imprint of the event begins to more strongly assert itself. Large pink banners appear along the length of Republic Street, rhythmically flapping in the uncharacteristically frosty wind of early March.

The Inquisitor’s Palace, Vittoriosa

On an early walk past Fort St Elmo, I met Laura Besançon, a Maltese artist, waiting on the side of the road to erect her large-scale installation – a segment of a red metal crane laid horizontally across the fort’s entrance plaza – in situ. Signs of fuller biennale life are therefore manifesting, communicating the momentum of an event near realisation.

The collective mise-en-scène of the biennale appears to be pieced together by these spontaneous encounters, sightings, and social media posts more than it is via the slick, substantial profile-raising campaign one might expect tied to an endeavour of this scope. Only time will tell if this translates to success, and even then, it all depends on the yardstick by which it is measured.

For now, Malta’s inaugural art biennale feels like many of the islands’ historically unlikely, yet indelible, cultural ventures. By way of a couple of examples: the now disbanded Malta Contemporary Art, known by its acronym MCA, which began in 2008 with spartan exhibitions in a large warehouse in Marsa. Or the Kinemastik Film Festival, which is still staged, but remains true to its indie, grass roots origins.

Despite the glossy intentions for the biennale to act as a cultural beacon for Malta, in reality, it so far feels more akin to efforts that have been made part above, part underground – messy, but exposed and open, ripe for dispersal, for provocation, and for the promise of authentic impact.