As the last peal of bells drifts from Dockyard Creek across the Maltese skyline on September 23, Roderick Camilleri will feel a sense of satisfaction and completion.
A synchronised bell-ringing event signals the closing weeks of the AMuSE project, the first Creative Europe project to be selected for co-funding by the European Commission led by a Maltese organisation, the Malta Society of Arts.
And, as its artistic director, MR Camilleri has been shaping AMuSE since its proposal in 2017.
“It has sometimes been very challenging but we have achieved what we set out to do… (AMuSE) has been about community and giving a voice to people.”
AMuSE has created artist-in-residence programmes in three European partner countries - Italy, the Netherlands and Lithuania.
As Mr Camilleri explains, “the artist residencies in these three European countries were designed to give young and emerging artists the opportunity to work and collaborate within a community of fellow artists, and to experiment with new materials related to the senses.
"This approach is relatively new in the local visual art context and the collaborations between the 16 artists have created new connections and cultural dialogues with partners sharing similar objectives to those at the MSA.”
This month, the project will close with three events - the church bell ringing, an interactive concert, and a final collective exhibition.
These have been chosen to reflect the project because, as Mr Camilleri says, “the bells are the voice of the community – a community of artists within a community of people. We tried to create a context rather than one event – a mushrooming of different things coming together”.
The month-long exhibition will be divided into three sections according to the themes that emerged from the artist residencies - organic, man-made and traces.
These form a single exhibition with the underlying themes of community, and the ideological and cultural contexts that form aspects of the European identity, all under the umbrella theme of multisensoriality.
Perhaps this conversation around identity is the project’s main legacy?
Mr Camilleri thinks it was key, but introduces another element that resonates most with him.
“We have enjoyed introducing particular aspects of aesthetics related to multisensoriality that were expressed in terms of artworks, such as chocolate sculptures or olfactory drawings.
"AMuSE certainly isn’t just about super intellectual elements that people wouldn’t relate to, and we encouraged people to join in. To us, that’s the most important thing.”
As AMuSE comes to a close, the public is invited to join in with one last resounding peal of bells, as well as the rest of the highly-anticipated AMuSE programme.
AMuSE closing events will kick off on Monday at 7pm with ‘Peal’, the synchronised church bells ringing performance at Dockyard Creek (Dock No 1), and continue with the concert ‘SensitIV’ by Goldberg Ensemble on Tuesday at Palazzo de La Salle in Valletta at 7pm.
The final exhibition of artworks will be launched on Tuesday and will remain open until October 31 at Palazzo de La Salle. Entrance is free for all events. More details here.