Ten years ago, I joined architecture school is the subtitle Andrew Borg Wirth gives his most recent curatorial exercise at Valletta Contemporary.

The collective exhibition, featuring a group of young architects, investigates definitions of what it means to be an architect and re-examines the role it has in contemporary society. Maria Azzopardi, Andrew Borg Wirth, Isaac Buttigieg, Lucia Calleja, Jean Ebejer, Suzi Mifsud, Tracey Sammut, Feliċ

Micallef, Matthew Scerri, Nick Theuma and Mike Zerafa, using diverse media, explore both their industry as well as the constantly developing national confines of their profession.

‘Ark’a by Feliċ Micallef. Photo: Sandrine Guyat

It was exactly 10 years ago when I came across the 12 architects at the University of Malta. At the time I had just moved back to Malta, and like the collective, I enrolled myself at the same university, but to study art history.

Their faculty was less than a hundred metres away from my own, and with each student party or all-nighter at the university night-time study area, I watched them develop their craft and become the architectural designers they are today. In this light, it feels adequate that 10 years later I find myself, once again, voyeuristically gazing upon their work.

Curatorial text. Photo: Sandrine Guyat

Experiments in Entropy is not like every other collective exhibition. It is one about the chaotic nature of energy. Merging metaphysics with cultural phenomena as expressed in architectural design, it speaks of construction, climate adaptation, planning, real estate, and monument-making. A series of independent works beautifully illustrate the group’s collective understanding of cultural entropy; where it comes from, why it transforms, and why architectural and cultural languages more often than not become antagonistic and performative, creating a sort of continuum of metanarratives.

The artworks are connected by one overwhelming feeling, that of the bittersweet love for the lack of aesthetic. Ironi­cally enough, this has not only become the local architectural zeitgeist, but also an incredibly complex aesthetic within itself.

‘Postcards of Progress’ by Lucia Calleja. Photo: Sandrine Guyat

In defining itself through its flatness and kitsch, its pointlessness and its relentlessness, the concrete and aluminium monstrosities mushrooming all around us have – even in the most conservative art-historical definitions – become a radical style. The series of works act like a parable of latent postmodernity; they present a suspension of time and memory. They are the products of experiencing Malta in extremely different ways, which itself can be read as an extended metaphor for postmodernity.

In the works of Mifsud, for example, the past is melodramatically recreated in all its grandeur, and yet, its seriousness is compromised, against its own intention, by the flatness and trashiness of its own devices. She presents a prehistoric style set of (what seem to look like) liquid containers, which evoke tension between the sentimental and the ironic, intention and non-intention, taste and tastelessness.

‘Postcards of Progress’ by Lucia Calleja. Photo: Sandrine Guyat

The exhibition echoes T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; it asks us to “[b]e remembered; involved with past and future”, and that “[o]nly through time, time is conquered”. Here I must make reference to the works of Calleja, who presented a series of photographs of postmodern architectural idiosyncrasies which have been around for so long that one no longer questions their validity.

'Experiments in Entropy' is not like every other collective exhibition. It is one about the chaotic nature of energy

One photo in particular presents an unfinished showroom in Victoria, Gozo, as some sort of classical ruin; one that is indisputably bound to the city, and how it presents itself to its audiences. Would an effort to eradicate this ‘ugly’ not strike terror in the hearts of all, including myself, who grew up to find comfort in the feeling of home that the building creates, and in doing so, render them homeless?

Perhaps this idea of homelessness is at the core of Experiments in Entropy. By adopting a postmodern perspective, the architects challenge what it means to produce and reproduce, while taking into account the complexity brought about by the digital era, where truth and mistruths are blurred beyond recognition.

‘Vessels’ by Suzi Mifsud. Photo: Lucia Calleja

In a time when data has become the most important currency, the exhibition presents a new way of knowing and feeling, one that does away with the usual critique of postmodern practices. It presents an evocation of pleasurable feeling, as expressed in Borg Wirth’s quasi-romantic filtered glass, the preservation of detachment and distance, as in Azzopardi’s scientific soundscape cataloguing, and most impressively, the invitation for re-visitation, as in Micallef’s modern-day classical victory arch with comical low-reliefs.

Exercise after exercise, work after work, the exhibition canvasses a pluralistic approach to what is real and what is not. Truth becomes malleable to a point where fiction, conspiracy, metanarratives, and the hyper-real become interchangeable with it, and any preoccupation about their legitimacy in our contemporary practices loses its significance.

‘Monuments to Sleep On’ by Andrew Borg Wirth. Photo: Sandrine Guyat

I left the exhibition thinking that the works were so beautifully pitted up against each other, their sequence so evocatively suggesting an artistic entropic flow, the kinship between the 11 so evident, that somewhere along the way, the harmony they created starts working against their radical stances against post-postmodernism. Experiments in Entropy ends up presenting to us a new style, and makes a case for why it should be here to stay. Through the exhibition, a new aesthetic of identity is fashioned, and if this aesthetic sensibility can still be defined in academic or postmodernist terms, the question persists: Should one still be debating the extent of its relevance?

Experiments in Entropy, curated by Andrew Borg Wirth, is still on at Valletta Contemporary from January 11 to February 18.

Luke Azzopardi is a fashion designer and costume historian. He has recently published an art book on Malta’s national costume titled Għonnella: Deconstructing the Garment.