There is perhaps no art form more subversive than street art.
Scribbled, scratched, painted or plastered illicitly in public urban spaces, it serves as powerful and rebellious social commentary meant to shock and provoke thought.
The area around the university has long been a space for street artists to vent their frustrations and show off their talents and, last week, the largest mural on campus was unveiled.
The enormous work of art features part of Malta’s oldest poem, Il-Kantilena, and concerns about the tyrannous construction industry that rules supreme in this country.
The mural, featuring Maltese freshwater crabs snapping cranes and clearly putting up a fight for their habitat, is intertwined with the words “Waqgħet hi, imrammti, l’ili żmien nibni”. Roughly translated, these words from the poem mean: the home I had been building for so long collapsed.
It’s an irony that should be lost on no one that Il-Kantilena was written in response to a parable about a man who built his house on sand, only for it to fall apart.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though, as the piece also shows Maltese honeybees wearing hard hats, replanting new trees and bringing fresh hope.
A powerful message – one that shouldn’t be ignored or brushed aside by our authorities
The mural painted by seven young artists is a visual manifestation of what polls and surveys have been showing us for years: that our youth is fed up with overdevelopment and the destruction of their home country.
In a survey commissioned by FreeHour Malta in 2022, using a sample of 2,037 respondents between the ages of 16-27, 68.2% of respondents said they viewed Malta as being overdeveloped, and 83.1% feared that Malta’s environmental situation would become worse over the next five years.
This important survey was followed up by another significant one carried out by Misco a year later among Maltese people between the ages of 16-34, where 85% of the participants stated that they were concerned about construction and 80% about the environment.
The reality is that our adolescents are statistically less happy than they were a decade ago, and citizens under 30 are the unhappiest in the European Union. And where unhappiness goes, art usually follows.
In a country that often shuns dissidence and activism, new street art strategically painted near one of our most important educational institutions sends a powerful message – one that shouldn’t be ignored or brushed aside by our authorities.
As the brain drain continues and we have fewer children than ever before, it is becoming more apparent that our youth is no longer happy with governments that only consider short-term goals and have no blueprints for the country’s future. Nothing speaks louder than literally saying: “I don’t want to bring more people into this crowded mess when I’m already struggling to stay in it myself.”
Here’s hoping that this mural is one of the first of the many building blocks that it is going to take to bring this country back to a greener, cleaner state where the environment is actually given a priority instead of the constant greenwashed lip service that we keep seeing in the form of ludicrous, costly, dying green walls and alien plants on our roundabouts that have no real way of surviving our harsh weather conditions.
Our young are speaking; maybe it’s time we took them seriously and started listening.