Il-Majjistral Park, Mellieħa
Beyond What Drifts Us Apart (BWDUA) unfolds as a long-term curatorial framework developed by Elyse Tonna, seeking to uncover the overlooked narratives of Malta’s coastal towers and their fragile surroundings. This third edition, situated at Il-Majjistral Park, departs from the tower itself – eroded, suspended and inaccessible – to explore the wider ecologies and socio-political tensions that press against it. The project embraces precarity not as a limitation, but as a method, positioning the tower’s instability as a metaphor for broader environmental and cultural vulnerabilities.
The residency functions as a living laboratory: a space of attunement where artistic research overlaps with ecological investigation and community dialogue. Rather than working towards a conventional exhibition, the 2025 programme unfolded through weekly open studios, workshops and participatory events, allowing ideas to evolve publicly through exchange and encounter. The methods employed are rooted in fieldwork, walking, listening and unmaking – slow gestures that mirror the rhythms and conditions of the site. Knowledge circulates across human and non-human communities, with each activity serving simultaneously as research and output.
The selected artists expand these approaches in distinct yet complementary ways. Giulia Iacolutti imagines the eventual collapse of the tower, linking its geological fragility with underwater worlds through photography, anthotype processes, workshops with children and speculative collaboration with freedivers. Martina Farrugia rethinks fieldwork itself, creating speculative archives that destabilise fixed narratives by collecting sonic fragments, tactile traces and socio-political micro-observations of the landscape. Nicole Borg (Indiġikċina) and Noah Fabri work through food as a site of ambiguity, foraging and preserving edible plants to question land access, ownership and the politics of culinary identity.
Together, these practices position BWDUA as an evolving framework for coexistence – one that resists urgency, attends to the invisible and remains open to speculation. Rather than seeking resolution, the project creates conditions for care, dialogue and sensitivity, asking what it means to remain with what drifts us.
Manifesto
We begin from the edge.
From towers built to mark territory,
to watch, to divide.
Structures of power that remain,
while the coastline shifts beneath.
Beyond What Drifts Us Apart is a refusal to accept these boundaries as fixed.
It is a call to look again, to listen, to remain close.
We walk. We pause. We trace.
We begin with what is present – not to extract, but to attend.
We shape our work around the conditions of the site:
its rhythms, its timeframes, its silences.
We do not intervene with urgency.
We respond with care.
Our work is rooted in curiosity, observation and the possibility of connection.
We look closely. We listen carefully.
We attend to the invisible, the overlooked, the non-human.
We believe relationships emerge over time, through shared presence and sensitivity.
We commit to:
– ecological thinking as both method and ethics
– post-anthropocentric empathy and attention to what exceeds human perception
– decolonial practices that unsettle inherited narratives and challenge control
– site-specificity as a mode of coexistence, not merely location
– situated practice grounded in observation, care and collaboration
– ephemerality as strength
– coexistence as a curatorial framework
– slowness as resistance
– empathy as a relational method – a way of listening, sensing and being-with
Beyond What Drifts Us Apart is not only a curatorial framework.
It is a slow unfolding of attention, process and dialogue.
A gathering of gestures, field notes and small, intentional acts.
Each edition is shaped by its place, its urgencies and its ecologies.
We are not here to resolve.
We are here to remain.
To be affected.
To drift – and to stay with what drifts us.
The Projects
Each project in this edition of BWDUA reflects a different way of attending to the fragility of Għajn Tuffieħa – whether through the tower’s imagined collapse, the unmaking of fieldwork into speculative archives, or the ambiguous ecologies of food. Together, they form a dialogue moving between micro-observations and broader environmental urgencies.
Giulia Iacolutti – I’m Falling Down
Giulia Iacolutti’s I’m Falling Down poses a deceptively simple yet unsettling question: who really collapses – us, or the tower? Centred on the fragile state of Għajn Tuffieħa Tower, the project approaches collapse not as an ending but as a transformation. Once a symbol of control, the tower now embodies vulnerability, its erosion mirroring wider ecological crises across the site. Its eventual fall is reimagined as protest and liberation – a gesture that resists human domination and gestures instead towards cycles of renewal.
This framework expanded through workshops inviting communities to speculate, play and create around the idea of falling. In collaboration with Maltese digital artist Rakel Vella, Giulia worked with artists, biologists and environmentalists to combine underwater photography, Majjistral Park research and artificial intelligence, envisioning speculative underwater futures in which the tower’s collapse reshapes the seabed and marine ecosystems. A second workshop, held on the beach with children, transformed collapse into embodied play – building, dismantling and letting stones fall as a way of experiencing impermanence and creativity simultaneously.
Beyond these sessions, Giulia experimented with Posidonia-based emulsions, producing photosensitive prints from seagrass as living records of the sea’s agency. She also initiated a collaboration with freedivers, who filmed gestures of free fall underwater, imagining the tower’s descent from its own perspective. This collective speculation transforms geological instability into a poetic vision, proposing collapse as care, resistance and renewal.
Martina Farrugia – Fieldnotes on Unmaking
Martina Farrugia’s Fieldnotes on Unmaking rethinks fieldwork as an expanded practice – one that resists fixed outcomes and instead becomes a space for wandering, writing, witnessing and unlearning. Rejecting colonial or museological models of “discovery”, the project embraces unmaking as both method and outcome. The archive is destabilised, giving way to a speculative, collective process shaped by uncertainty, encounter and attentiveness.
At Għajn Tuffieħa, where the tower exists in a state of erosion and instability, the project considers what it means to record a site in constant flux. Unmaking becomes a way of questioning not only what is preserved, but what resists preservation: sonic traces, tactile fragments and overlooked micro-ecologies. Socio-political pressures – including heritage restoration, tourism and ecological degradation – further complicate the act of documentation.
Through workshops, Martina introduced participants to unconventional DIY tools as methods of field research. In Sonic Artifacts, collective sound walks and piezo microphones tuned into hidden and temporary sounds of the landscape, forming a shared auditory archive. In Tactile and Visual Tracing, co-hosted with archaeologist Erika Ellul, participants created speculative tools from recycled materials to trace visual and tactile impressions of the surroundings. These acts of making and recording became collective gestures of unlearning and reimagining.
The project culminated in a speculative map, a digital repository and a collective sound piece – porous archives that resist permanence while remaining alive in fragments, reflecting the site’s past, present and possible futures.
Nicole Borg (Indiġikċina) & Noah Fabri – Reciprocal Abundance
Reciprocal Abundance frames food as both artistic practice and political inquiry, using cooking, preservation and sharing as tools for research and reflection. Borg and Fabri’s contribution centres on culinary ambiguity – the ways in which food embodies shifting identities, ecological entanglements and socio-political struggles. Food becomes more than sustenance: it is access, memory, commodity and resistance.
At Majjistral Park, this ambiguity unfolded through guided walks, participatory workshops and the creation of an edible archive. In collaboration with Timothy Tabone, participants foraged wild herbs and plants, reflecting on how land ownership, access and boundaries shape what is eaten and preserved. Fermentation and preservation functioned as speculative acts, asking how food might extend into the future, how identity is encoded in taste, and how ambiguity itself can become a form of resilience.
Drawing on fragments of ethnobotanical knowledge – from plants used to predict harvests to herbs favoured by pollinators and roots associated with both nourishment and danger – the project revealed how food systems are inseparable from cultural practice, memory and ecological change. The tower served as a symbolic anchor, tying together narratives of fragility, adaptation and continuity.
The project culminated in a tasting of foraged preserves, including carob vinegar, fig leaf oil, pine needle syrups and brined caper leaves. Each jar carried not only flavour, but also traces of research, fieldwork and collaboration, embodying food as a living archive of coexistence and ambiguity.
Magic Carpets
Beyond What Drifts Us Apart is part of the Magic Carpets Platform, co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme. The platform brings together 17 European cultural organisations, coordinated by Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, offering emerging artists opportunities to explore lesser-known areas and to create new works in collaboration with local communities, bringing regional particularities and traditions to light.
The Team
Produced by: Unfinished Art Space
Curated by: Elyse Tonna
Artists: Giulia Iacolutti, Martina Farrugia, Nicole Borg (Indiġikċina) in collaboration with Noah Fabri
Project Coordinator: Margerita Pulè
Project Manager: Emilia Figiel
Communications Manager: Maria Eileen Fsadni
Project Assistant: Diellza Ilgner
Graphic Design: 2point3
Photography: Elisa von Brockdorff & Iñigo Taylor
Videography: Karl Andrew Micallef
In collaboration with: Din l-Art Ħelwa, Majjistral Nature and History Park, Latitudo Art Projects
Special thanks: Darren Saliba, Yasmin Clark, Yolande Attard, Zoe Camilleri, Erika Ellul, Timothy Tabone, Rakel Vella, Piera Fabrizio Iacolutti, Nicola Muscat, Sarah Chircop, Edward Zammit, Elena Schiatti
Co-funded by the European Union
Curatorial text by Elyse Tonna