Now open in Spazju Kreattiv, the intriguing exhibition DREAM[of]LAND is the culmination of a year-long project by co-curators Elyse Tonna and Sarah Chircop.

Elyse Tonna’s curatorial interests relate to ecological thinking, the post-Anthropocene, speculative futures, living heri­tage and threatened landscapes. Sarah Chircop is interested in a discourse that is motivated and developed through collaboration and experimental work. Together, they have developed a collective dream world that draws on ideas of land, of the tangible and intangible, of materials drawn from the land and from traditions and stories inter­woven with its history.

DREAM[of]LAND is an immersive, meandering landscape in which visitors to the exhibition space, housed at Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta, are first ‘greeted’ by a sculpture of a woman, We Once Were One, by Femmy Otten. The only figurative piece in the show, she stands almost monastically over the rest of the exhibition.

Interior Pull by LaLaLa Collective. Photo: Lisa Attard

Emerging from a linden wood tree stump, as a fulcrum anchoring the diverse expressions that surround it, she embodies the essence of womanhood with rings representing each year.

“Rooted in motherhood and love, she subtly challenges socie­tal taboos, fostering an intimate form of activism that echoes through the ages,” explains Chircop. Standing tall and enigmatic, is she Mother Nature, I wonder? And of what does she dream?

The emergence of life from the land is referenced in a large clay pit from which, as the exhibition opened, three dancers emerged in a piece of performance art, Interior Pull, by Florence Peake in collaboration with LaLaLa Collective. The clay, 1,400kg of it, remains in place, kept wet, as a relic of this emergence and a reminder of the extraction of material from the land, triggering thoughts of what lies beneath.

Threads of Melite by Sephora Schembri. Photo: Lisa Attard

The materials used to create each of the curious pieces in the show are grounded in the landscape and were chosen with care. “They are a starting point for us to question our relationship to matter and to the land,” explains Chircop, “and an opportunity for us to reconsider the importance of the materials themselves and their legacies.”

Looking back, Sephora Schembri plays with the name of the islands, Melite in Medieval times, when this was a largely uninhabited place of sheep and beekeepers. Using wool collected from a local farmer to make threads, she has connected honey-making frames that imbue the exhibition with a scent of honey, the threads between then representing the movements that bees weave through the air.

A starting point to question our relationship to matter and land

Francesca Beltrame’s map of the Mediterranean, raised on a platform, draws on the legacy of local familial recipes relayed from generation to generation. Her work is a cast of the land and sea which stands on the tablecloth from the table on which her grandmother taught to her to cook and at which they shared family dinners. “All the materials used to create the pieces throughout the exhibition have their own ‘baggage’,” smiles Tonna.

Ħaxix Ħazin by Noah Fabri. Photo: Lisa Attard

Another piece on show, MYC_Cactus, is a garment created by Ukrainian artist Dasha Tsapenko. “Here the prickly pear plant takes centre stage,” continues Chircop, “offering nutrition to Dutch fungi and giving rise to a groundbreaking composite material. This intersection of botany and mycology unveils new narratives, culminating in a garment celebrating the rarely seen cactus skeleton ­− an ode to the Maltese prickly pear beauty, brought to life by mycelium.”

These subtle underpinnings aren’t necessarily explicit to allow visitors experience the show in the present time, to simply feel, smell and experience the land and the dreams genera­ted by it as they move through the space. A series of sentences, one by each piece, however, can be read together and like a poe­tic dream sequence themselves, they tell a story.

A view of the exhibition. Photo: Lisa Attard

Noah Fabri’s story, however, is written by hand on handmade paper created from paper and debris collected while on a walk between Ħamrun and Marsa.

“Titled Ħaxix Ħazin – or Bad Grass – the piece is named for the grass that we remove from the land, and yet it is in this in-between space, or a ‘trans’-space,” explains Chircop, “that the ecology of non-human species thrives.”

Exhibits at DREAM[of]LAND. Photo: Lisa Attard

Book-ending the space, Rakel Vella has created digital projections, the land on one side and the sea on the other. This also highlights the significance of boundaries, what is on one side and the other, and how they blur, posing the question of what is a dream and what is reality? The projections themselves are gene­rated using AI technology.

Rakel fed analogue photographs of typical Mediterranean scenes, the sea, and local flora and fauna into an algorithm to produce inventive other-worldly land- and seascapes, reconfiguring the essence of the land into timeless ethereal dreamscapes.

The exhibition runs till April 21.

A detail of one of the exhibits.

Another of the exhibits

Chircop and Tonna are currently finalising a small book, a pocket-sized dreamland which is an extension of the show, for publication later this month, in which invited authors from around the Mediterranean have contributed their own dreams in writing and drawing.

The exhibition DREAM [of] LAND runs until April 21 in Space A, Spazju Kreattiv. DREAM [of] LAND is a Spazju Kreattiv commission, supported by Arts Council Malta, the Italian Cultural Institute in Malta and Culture Moves Europe − a project funded by the European Union.