Over 100 paintings have been taken down at MUŻA due to mould on the walls, less than a year after the inauguration. Apparently, parts of the building had flooded with water when they were left open during restoration works. The thick walls must dry out, which takes time.
I won’t point fingers at the staff. I know that they had some exciting and innovative plans and ideas for the place. The implementation fell short, and there are probably many sides to that story.
First announced in 2011, the new art museum MUŻA was intended to be a flagship of Valletta’s Capital of Culture year in 2018. In order to keep to the 2018 deadline, however, the building was opened before it was finished.
A senior official quoted anonymously by this newspaper said that they had told “the powers-that-be” last year not to open the museum. It was so damp that a mould outbreak could not be avoided. But the government insisted on opening in November 2018, “fearing political fallout due to earlier promises”. If so, it rashly risked damaging the national collection of art for political kudos.
The bottom line is that Valletta deserves state-of-the-art museums. I hope that the government will now invest the necessary funds to enable Heritage Malta to get this place, with its great potential, into top shape. Malta has fabulous artefacts and objects to showcase. Our museums must be empowered and funded to make the most of this, and to engage with the community in innovative ways.
Another still-awaited museum is the Palace, which was to be set up after the House of Representatives moved to its new building. But the Parliament chamber, formerly the armoury, at the Palace was instead revamped into a temporary conference room for Malta’s EU presidency in 2017, at considerable expense.
Little else has since been heard of this project, or of any other intended use of this important building with its prime location in the centre of Valletta. This project has fantastic potential.
The new Parliament building at the Valletta entrance was intended to house a permanent display on Malta’s parliamentary or political history. But nothing more has been heard of that either. The open-air theatre in the opera house ruins next door was a promising idea, but has been left with an unfinished and untidy look. Its possibilities, with some creative thinking, could be so much greater.
Another Valletta project in the pipeline is the rehabilitation of the Biċċerija area, already proposed in Renzo Piano’s master plan for Valletta in the 1990s. In the meantime, Strait Street has been injected with new life. Apart from the occasional good show at the Splendor, however, so far it is mainly restaurants and cafés with some street music. Lower Fort St Elmo is sadly still a mess.
The MUŻA setback will surely be solved, but it symbolises this quick-fix mentality
Having said that, I don’t believe that every corner of Valletta needs to be maintained, polished and packed with activity. Quiet, forgotten, dilapidated streets have their attractions too.
In this atmosphere of ‘rehabilitation’, the photography of David Pisani explores a poignant view of a dilapidated city, his ‘Vanishing Valletta’. The collections of old photography published by Giovanni Bonello, or the early 20th-century photos of Richard Ellis, are valuable historical documents but also open wistful windows on to life in a Valletta world which is gone. George Cini’s engaging books on Strait Street in the 20th-century also do this.
Nostalgia is not a way forward. Valletta was once a bustling residential city, but this is over. Its houses and apartments are inconvenient, compared to other residential areas. They mostly do not have parking facilities or lifts. They are damp and cold in winter, and can be very hot in summer.
The city lies on the sea but access to the coast is obviously limited, and swimming is hardly an attractive or easy option with a busy harbour on either side. Residents had moved to Sliema and elsewhere by the 20th century for practical reasons. Most people understandably want to live as comfortably as possible. And Valletta property prices today are also seriously expensive.
Yet Valletta is a gem, residential or not, and it keeps on getting nicer. It is always inspiring and special. It is a hub of activity during the day and lovely in the evenings.
V18 was meant to include some kind of master plan for Valletta beyond 2020, based on its results. Eight months after the end of 2018, was V18 a success? How has it been evaluated? Unfortunately, it was dogged and overshadowed by controversy almost throughout.
Six months before the V18 opening, it was reported that several persons holding leading positions related to this project had been dismissed or transferred. That was not a good start. It had prompted a group of persons involved in the cultural and creative industries to write an open letter in July 2017, published in the newspapers, deriding the governance style at the V18 Foundation.
Capitals of culture are European, not national, projects. Promoting European cultural diversity and collaborating with European counterparts is a central aim of this substantial investment. But the other European Capital of Culture of 2018, Leeuwarden in the Netherlands, had refused to collaborate with V18 chairman Jason Micallef.
Micallef was prominently involved in the continual clearing of the makeshift memorial to the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in front of the law courts. This was considered to be a negative and inappropriate move for his position. In a Facebook post he cynically twisted the words of Daphne’s last blog post before she was murdered. Partisan politics got in the way of V18.
Micallef’s reputation nose-dived, also in international circles. A group of prominent international writers had urged the European Commission to look into his repeated mocking of Daphne. When Justice Minister Owen Bonnici, responsible for the culture sector, attended a V18 event in Leeuwarden, he had faced flak for refusing to distance himself from Micallef’s comments.
In truth, the reputation of the whole island was in freefall in 2018 after Daphne’s murder and the negative handling of the Panama Papers by the government. The pressure is still on, with the government’s delay in holding an inquiry into the circumstances of the murder.
The government is a master of self-promotion, but is more interested in short-term sales and not long-term reputation. Turning over fast earnings is what counts.
But reputation does matter in the long run. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat may have experienced this in Brussels, when the new EU top jobs were deliberated. He was understood to have been interested in a post but was denied a place in the running partly because of Malta’s reputational fallout of 2017-18.
This reputational damage will come home to roost again. The government will one day change, as it always does eventually, and the nation will bear the long-term consequences of a short-term mentality.
This mentality also drives the government thinking on the environment, with an unsustainable level of construction destroying the landscape, bit by bit. This is practically irreversible. The same mentality also drives the transport and infrastructure sector. Building new roads to cater for an ever-increasing quantity of cars, without a modal shift to public transport, only papers over the cracks.
The MUŻA setback will surely be solved, but it symbolises this quick-fix mentality. The government wanted to present immediate positive headlines, but did not pay enough attention to the creeping rot beneath the surface.