Beyond What Drifts Us Apart
Beyond What Drifts Us Apart (BWDUA) is the title of an art event curated by Elyse Tonna in the frame of the Mahalla Festival 2023 taking place in November 2023 in Malta.
BWDUA is an interdisciplinary site-specific project which attempts to uncover the less dominant narratives associated with the environments surrounding historic coastal towers and the consequent relationships between the impacted landscapes and non-human communities in Malta.
BWDUA is a collaborative event of the Istanbul-based Mahalla Festival organized by the cultural organization Diyalog and Malta-based Unfinished Art Space, including site-specific artistic interventions, artists residencies and community-oriented activities. The project will bring together six artists, three Maltese artist, and three international artists-in-residence. They will initiate a dialogue and facilitate an exchange of ideas regarding the post-Anthropocene era, speculative futures, ecological thinking, endangered landscapes, and non-human communities.
BWDUA in Malta 2023 is part of the MagiC Carpets platform, co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program. The MagiC Carpets platform brings together 21 European cultural organizations, coordinated by Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, offering opportunities for emerging artists to explore little-known areas and to create, together with local communities, new works that bring to light regional particularities and traditions. The aim is to raise awareness of undervalued cultural aspects in modern society, thus facilitating intercultural access, engagement, and dialogue. The Mahalla Festival (Association Diyalog) and Unfinished Art Space are two of the 21 members from twenty-one countries in Europe. Sabine Küper-Büsch, Artistic Director of the Mahalla Festival and Deputy General Secretary of the Association Diyalog is the advisor to Curator Elyse Tonna in the framework of the Magic Carpets Network.
The artists Samuel Ciantar (MT), Fernando P Ferreira (PT), Marija Rasa Kudabaite (LT) and Rakel Vella (MT) are participating in Beyond What Drifts Us Apart in the frame of the MagiC Carpets Network.
A post-colonial, post-Anthropocene, ecological approach is reflected through the utilization of innovative artistic practices in order to reinforce the notion of enhancing the connections between contemporary art and cultural heritage.
Unfinished Art Space and Diyalog will be collaborating with Malta’s National Heritage Trust, Din l-Art Helwa, to contextualize interventions in sites under their care. The intervention will be situated 2023 within and around the Qalet Marku tower in Baħar ic-Cagħaq.
The project invites local communities in Malta to participate in contemporary arts practice. The primary artistic concept of the project is site-specific and multi-disciplinary, utilizing typical Maltese watchtowers and other Maltese locations that have not been utilized previously in an artistic manner. This approach opens up avenues for community inclusion on curtain levels, including but not limited to workshops, community involvement in the process of creating art works, panels, and dialogues with the audience.
Participating artist: Samuel Ciantar (MT), Fernando P Ferreira (PT), Charlene Galea (MT), Alfred Graf (AT), Marija Rasa Kudabaite (LT), Rakel Vella (MT)
