Spaces and Memories: Spazju Kreattiv Artists' Residency Closing Event
Sharing of Outcomes by Spazju Kreattiv Artists in Residence Thaís dos Santos Silva and Ludi Adelino Djama
Spaces and Memories is a site-specific artistic creation project that brings together critical studies of coloniality, ethnographic narratives, and embodied practices to investigate the relationships between the body, urban space, and collective memory in Valletta, Malta. Drawing on real stories from community members particularly those connected to the period of independence and other historical processes, the project seeks to challenge official narratives and to value situated community knowledge, including cultural practices such as carnival.
Through collaborative creation processes, artists develop twelve artworks that translate oral testimonies into performative actions, installations, and hybrid formats. Artistic collaboration fosters a plural perspective on political and historical transitions, as well as multiple readings of lived narratives, emphasizing memory as a field of dispute, affect, and interpretation. The body is understood as a political territory and a sensitive archive in which historical and colonial traces remain inscribed, yet are also questioned, reconfigured, and transformed through artistic practice, opening space for gestures of rupture and reinvention.
Alongside the exhibition, the project proposes an effective route through the city, in which specific urban sites are activated through layers of personal memory, presence, and listening. This creates an experience of symbolic augmented reality, where past and present coexist within the audience’s journey.
Developed by Associação Tudanzas and Wylsum Cultura, the project affirms art as a community-based practice, a tool for intercultural mediation, and a strategy for producing critical knowledge about territory, belonging, and decolonial processes.
Spazju Kreattiv Artists’ Residency programme is organised in collaboration with the Valletta Design Cluster and the Ministry for Gozo
_________________________________________________________________
CLOSING EVENT & SHARING OF THE RESIDENCY OUTCOMES
Date: Wednesday 25th February, 6:30 pm
Venue: Valletta Design Cluster
The roundtable of the project Spaces and Memories proposes a space for dialogue to reflect on the project itself and on its research and creation processes, with the aim of giving visibility to real narratives from the Valletta community related to the period of independence and other historical processes. Through embodiment and diverse artistic practices, the project explores how the body, urban space, and memory are intertwined, revealing affective, political, and social layers inscribed in the city’s territories.
In this encounter, the project’s participants, artists from diverse disciplines will share their creative processes, working methodologies, and the stories they collected, discussing how these memories were transformed into performative actions and other creative formats. The project is developed by Associação Tudanzas and Wylsum Cultura and is hosted by Spazju Kreatttiv as part of the Artists’ Residency Programme, in collaboration with the Valletta Cultural Agency (VCA) and the Valletta Design Cluster, fostering dialogue between the community, artists, and the public.
