Dr Francis Zammit Dimech, Minister of Resources and the Infrastructure, last Thursday evening, asked singer (and Sliema resident) Ira Losco to join him in inaugurating the completely refurbished 1.5 km-long Sliema promenade, designed by Architect Emanuel Buttigieg.

Ira also entertained those present with a rendition of 7th Wonder, the song which brought her within a whisker of winning the Eurovision Song Contest in Estonia last month. Entertainment was also provided by the Mdina Brass Quintet, among others.

An intriguing feature of the new promenade is a highly intriguing sculpture at Fond Ghadir by Architect Richard England entitled White Shadows, which was also inaugurated on Thursday.

Professor England, who did the work without payment, provided The Sunday Times with the following explanation of the meaning the sculpture - which is a clever play with light and shadows - is intended to convey:

White Shadows is a sculpture of cut-outs of human figures depicting family groups strolling on the promenade; an evocation of what in fact is the main function of this new embellishment project, where people take regular morning or evening strolls.

The cut-outs in the vertical marble slab cast elongated white shadows on the promenade's paving in the early hours of the morning. At the height of the summer season in the hot noonday hours the shadows almost vanish.

This is the tantalising aspect of the work. In not revealing all its secrets all the time, the work becomes a sculpture which is designed to tease, provoke and which can only be totally understood and deciphered within the total cyclic time frame of a whole calendar year.

Only in certain seasons, particularly in winter when the sun is at its lowest height, do we get the mysterious white shadows cast on the platform. To view them one must play the waiting game. Of all the people on the family walk, it is only these sculpted cut-outs which cast shadows in white.

Shadows by definition are dark implying a concept of "no light". In this work the process is reversed and the shadows cast by the cut-out pattern are in fact "light".

During daytime at the various times of the year, the sculpture acts as a form of gnomon marking in dynamic form the inevitability of the passage of time. As each day passes, light shadows mark time recurrent and time changing in an intermix of both white light and black shadow. Only at night is this seasonal Time-Marker constant. During the hours of darkness the elongated shadows once again cast in white are static, delineated in fixed light silhouettes on the marble platform.