Where have all the gardens gone?

A Place That Fades, a new exhibition at MUŻA by Giola Cassar, reflects on the disappearance of domestic gardens from our urban spaces, a loss that has far-reaching ecological, cultural and psychological repercussions.

This is Cassar’s second solo exhibition which, curated by Elyse Tonna, unfolds as a quiet, reflective environment. It is composed of more than 250 photographic prints on fabric, each of which was created using a delicate and unstable process that reflected the exhibition’s central theme of impermanence: images appear only partially, often blurred or faded, resisting clarity and permanence.

Each print is an imprint of a dried leaf collected from private gardens: fragments of spaces that are increasingly inaccessible or disappearing altogether.

Rather than reconstruct what has been lost, A Place That Fades offers a space for contemplation – inviting visitors to engage with absence, memory and the quiet erosion of everyday green spaces. It gestures towards the overlooked, the peripheral and the fragile traces that remain.

The poster of the exhibition

In doing so, it prompts a broader reflection on what it means personally, collectively and ecologically – when these once-intimate landscapes begin to vanish from our lives.

“I grew up with access to a garden that was also my playground, a place to imagine, to dream, to be alone or together,” says Cassar.

“It was only when I lived without access to green space that I truly understood the impact it had on my well-being. Becoming a mother deepened this awareness, recognising how increasingly rare and precious these spaces are for future generations. The garden, I’ve come to realise, is more than a space. It’s a threshold between worlds, a quietly radical ecology of remembrance.”

Cassar explains that she has focused on domestic gardens because they are often overlooked, and are seen as too ordinary to be protected, too private to be mourned. “But these modest spaces hold so much,” she comments.

An invitation to pause, to look closer

“They’re micro-ecologies and archives of human and non-human relationships. They are layered with memory, rituals, and sensory experiences. Their disappearance is not sudden but cumulative, a slow unravelling of meaning, community and biodiversity.

“We often focus on environmental loss on a large scale, but this project is about smaller, everyday absences – the domestic, the unnoticed. Many homes used to have at least a small patch of soil, a tree or a corner of green. These details may have seemed modest, but they shaped how we moved through our days. As they disappear, they change how we live, how we remember and how we connect to our surroundings.

“I chose leaves as a central motif because they embody this tension between loss and resilience. Even after being severed from their source, they remain visually stunning. In their fragility, there is power. In their drying, a kind of transformation. The way they dry and curl speaks of quiet resistance. They become like maps of time, of transformation, of decay.”

A Place That Fades offers a space for contemplation.

The acetone transfer process that Cassar used to create the prints mirrors this: unstable, partial, always fading.

“The process of making the acetone prints was incredibly labour-intensive,” she smiles. “Every print is unique, and the materials were temperamental.

There were many failures, faded images, torn fabric but those imperfections became part of the work’s language. They echoed the very idea I was trying to explore: how nothing stays the same, and how even in fading, something remains.”

And in this way, in A Place That Fades, is about much more than gardens. It’s about the invisible thresholds we cross as our environment shifts about the liminal space between memory and absence, between presence and forgetting. It is an invitation to pause, to look closer, and to ask what it means when places of refuge, for both humans and non-humans, begin to dissolve.

A Place That Fades runs at MUŻA until May 18.