Film of winning design project ‘URNA’ premieres at Spazju Kreattiv

Stephanie Sant’s film URNA was created as part of the project by the same name, presented by Malta at this year’s London Design Biennale. The film premiered at Spazju Kreattiv on August 23.

URNA is an innovative project that recently won the outstanding contribution award at the 2025 London Design Biennale and explores the delicate subject of cremation.

The installation is the result of a creative alliance between artists, architects and designers. The team uses large, nondescript boulders to devise spherical modules that incorporate cremated remains, “embodying the individual’s connection to a broader cosmic reality and evolving through tactile interventions that invite various cultural interpretations”.

The project anticipates the introduction of cremation in the Maltese islands, putting forward a new way of handling human remains. It aims at re-establishing death as a symbolic ceremony.

“I wrote out the concept of the film right after my first call with Anthony Bonnici, where he had quickly explained the structure and the idea of having human remains mixed with reconstituted limestone in each layer that would, in time, lead to a sphere made up of layers of human remains,” Sant explains.

Stephanie Sant. Photo: Franny Schembri

“These were early days but I knew from the start that I wanted to imagine a ritual especially for this structure, and I applied my long-time wish to film a performance inspired by the newwieħa/bikkejja, who were professional mourners that were usually women, hired to weep during funerals in Malta, up until the 19th century.”

Sant’s short film shows three mourners walking through a quarry to perform a funerary ritual. The film zooms in on the texture of the rock, contrasted by the small dark figures of the actors moving through the quarry. The action takes place accompanied by a soundtrack of eerie, gothic music that sometimes felt a bit too dramatic but that was effective in setting the mood.

The filming has a seamless and smooth flow to it, and skilfully shifts focus to direct our attention from one performer to the other. The actors’ performance is also effective and their movement creates an evocative image of three wailing women blending into each other like a mournful wave.

From left, Thomas Mifsud, Anthony Bonnici, Matthew Attard Navarro, Stephanie Sant, Andrew Borg Wirth

The film captures beautifully this suspended moment. One only wonders if it would have been even more powerful had it been less stylised and more emotional.

Sant says she “wanted to create a ritual that, despite the familiar elements used (Maltese stone, Maltese faces, ritual archetypes like processions and oblations) held an inexplicable ‘otherwordliness’ to it. I did not want to use language in order to give space to the emotions conveyed by the performers (Zoe Camilleri, Charlotte Grech, Martina Georgina and Jesmark Scicluna). I wanted to create a film whose mood and atmosphere could seduce the spectator the same way a narration normally does.”

Sant is a Paris-based Maltese film-maker, writer and performer. Her work and her involvement in other artists’ work have taken part in the 2019 Venice Biennale (San Marino Pavilion), the 2021 Biennale Danza in Venice, the 2024 Accelerator with Werner Herzog and Peter Zeitlinger organised by La Selva Coop, Spazju Kreattiv (MT), la Friche la Belle de Mai (FR) and Het Nieuwe Instituut (NL) and the Maltese Pavillion at the 2025 London Design Biennale.

URNA will be coming to Ħaġar Qim in Malta this September, as part of the Malta Arts Council Retold exhibition, reviving projects funded over the last decade.

The team behind URNA is composed of Andrew Borg Wirth, Anthony Bonnici, Matthew Attard Navarro, Thomas Mifsud, Stephanie Sant, Anne Immelé and Tanil Raif. URNA was the Malta Pavilion at the London Design Biennale, commissioned by Arts Council Malta and made possible through support from Halmann Vella, Gasan Foundation, Embassy of France in Malta, Malta Enterprise, Visit Malta, KM Malta Airlines and all other partners.