Farfara On Top of the World
7 June, 10am - 10pm
Għargħur Searchlight Position, Top of the World, Għargħur
A call-to-action; a curatorial experiment; a collaboration over time; something fluid which only exists when we are there. An experimental curatorial and artistic project, with a group of diverse but like-minded people.
Farfara comes and goes - it means different things to different people - it appears when we meet, and melt away again as we disperse. It allows us to imagine possibilities, and to come together at a particular time and place, which can be simultaneously tangible and intangible, known and unknown, visible, yet invisible. Top of the World is a place that looks out to sea, from where an island could become visible, and can be imagined, with all its characteristics and proclivities. The site allows us to be sentinels - the ideal site to imagine an island rising out of the sea.
Thus, the experience of Farfara will manifest at that place and time , and will only exist while we are there. All creators will be participants, and all participants will be creators; Farfara will be something fluid, which we witness changing there and then, and which we influence but which also influences us.
Work is imagined & prepared beforehand, but is placed, manifested, shaped there and then, in a co-curatorial, collaborative act. So we engage in an act of bringing and sharing, rather than extracting or consuming.
Participating artists:
Aidan Celeste & Manuela Zammit, Amparo Alonso Sanz, Bettina Hutschek, Caldon Mercieca, Charlene Galea, Cyril Sancereau, Dali Aguerbi & Bobb Attard, Elise Billiard Pisani & Katel Delia, Florinda Camilleri, Joey Borg, John Grech, Josephine Burden, Kris Polidano & Sheldon Saliba, Marcia Grima, Maren Richter, Margerita Pulè, Raphael Vella, Ryan Falzon, Tom Van Malderen
Thanks to: Salesians of Don Bosco
Programme coming soon!
The site was originally planned to be used as a gun battery, but later used to operate searchlights during both World Wars. The searchlights were designed to sweep the ground and area below but during WW2 they were also used to observe the night sky.
Info from Fort Finder
Farfara 2031 Bid Book Family open meeting, exploring the question; Why does Farfara wish to take part in the competition for the title of European Capital of Culture?
Wednesday 1 November 2023, 6pm - 8pm, The Catholic Institute, Floriana
Past Events
Past Events
Futuring Islands
22 April 2023, 4pm - 9pm
Studio Solipsis, 73, Triq il-Kbira, Rabat
4pm
Talk
Caldon Mercieca | reviewing the future of Farfara through archipelagic thinking
Uzoma Orji, Anna Fehres & Luke Conroy, and Alexandra Olympia Peristeraki | Virtual artists-in-residence on the island of Farfara
Toni Attard, Margerita Pulè, Maren Richter, and Karsten Xuereb | Farfarians in conversation - virtuality shaping a radical understanding of culture & democracy
6:30pm
Perform
Farfarians Unite | Open Mic - guests are invited to present ideas around virtuality, physicality and the future of ECoCs, using words extracted during our research process
8pm
Plan
Farfara Future | Stick around and plan the future of Farfara 2031
Futuring Islands was supported by Arts Council Malta’s Digital Research and Development Scheme and the Cultural Diplomacy Fund of the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs and Trade.
Workshop with artist Taeyoon Choi
24 February, 2pm - 4pm
The Internet and social media platforms today are built around capitalist logic of control and exploitation of data. Saying "Data is the New Gold" reflects problematic understanding of users and platforms as something to be mined. Yet, Instagram, Facebook, Google and other tech giants remain crucial in contemporary community and creative practices. What are other ways of connecting online? Can we use the Internet towards building solidarity, interdependence, groundedness between people, other species and the environment at large? In this workshop, we will explore alternative, free, open source Internet protocols, hardwares and systems, as well as artists, designers and activists exploring other ways of building and using the Internet.
References
Distributed Web of Care
Secure Scuttlebutt Run Your Social
Are.na
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
Website is a World
Compost Magazine
Low-Tech Magazine
Supported by Arts Council Malta’s Digital Research and Development Scheme and the Cultural Diplomacy Fund of the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs and Trade.
Other Internet: Towards Interdependence and Solidarity, Instead of Surveillance and Exploit of Data
Taeyoon Choi (USA) is an artist, educator, and organizer. He is a co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation, an artist-run institution with the motto of “More Poetry, Less Demo!” Taeyoon seeks a sense of gentleness, intellectual kinship, magnanimity, justice and solidarity in his work and collaboration. He co-organized the Code Ecologies conference about the environmental impact of technology. As a disability justice organizer, Taeyoon continues to work with the Deaf and Disability community towards accessibility and inclusion.
Events
3 - 6 November 2022
In collaboration with the Cultural Diplomacy Fund of the Embassy of Malta in Vienna,
and the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs and Trade
Thursday 3 November
Filmhaus (Kino am Spittelberg)
Spittelberggasse 3, 1070 Vienna
17:30 | Luzzu
a film by Alex Camilleri
(by registration only)
Friday, 4 November
Farfara 2031 HQ
Studio Eckermann/Nestler, Neulinggasse 9, 1030 Vienna
17:00 | Farfara exhibition
18:00 | Bettina Hutschek | A performance lecture juxtaposing Plato’s mythical island Atlantis and today’s Malta, in order to suggest personal reflections on what we believe in, why we are hooked on utopian stories and how we construct meaning.
18:30 | Andreas Philippopoulos Mihalopoulos | Islands, law-scapes, floating bodies (recorded intervention)
19:00 | Shared meal from a future island | with Bela Eckerman
19:30 | Conversation Nneka Egbuna, Samwel Grima, Jordi Vegas Macias | research sharing in areas of food, survival and sustainability; physical and social islands and oases of activism
21:00 | Keit Bonnici | music
Saturday, 5 November
Farfara 2031 HQ
Studio Eckermann/Nestler, Neulinggasse 9, 1030 Vienna
11.00 | Futuring ECoCs - online only brunch panel discussion with Elizabeth Schweeger, Vuk Radulović, Matti Allam, Kelly Diapouli streamed live on www.facebook.com/farfara2031
14:00 | Technopolitics online workshop | Islands made (and to be unmade) of digitality, algorithmic governance, server farms, data logistics, financial infrastructure, crypto economies, metaverses, internet bubbls and meme cultures.
(by registration only)
17:00 | Farafara exhibition
18:00 | Ira Melkonyan | A lecture-performance triggered by the provocation of how to make/unmake a speculative island, informed by the notion of liquids as more-than-human actants
18:30 | Caldon Mercieca | A journey through the archipelago of hope and despair, on circling islands in various forms
19:00 | Shared meal from a future island | with Bela Eckerman
19:30 | Loranne Vella | A reading from Rokit, a scifi novel of a dystopian post-human Malta, addressing climate change, colonialism and political conflicts.
Sunday, 6 November
Farfara 2031 HQ
Studio Eckermann/Nestler, Neulinggasse 9, 1030 Vienna
12:00 | Farafara exhibition
13.00 | Brunch talks with Gerald Nestler, Margerita Pulè, Maren Richter, Karsten Xuereb, Toni Attard & guests | Findings from the weekend and plans for Farfara’s future
Futuring Islands was supported by Arts Council Malta’s Digital Research and Development Scheme and the Cultural Diplomacy Fund of the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs and Trade.
Futuring Islands
COLLABORATORS
Matti Allam || Matti is co-founder of and manager at Culture Works in Ireland. She is a member of The Capacity Building for European Capitals of Culture (ECoC) pool of multi-disciplinary experts. She previously managed several projects at the Western Development Commission, Galway 2020 and Film London.
Alex Camilleri || Alex is a Maltese-American writer, director, and producer. His debut feature, LUZZU, premiered to wide acclaim at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Acting. He won the 2022 “Someone To Watch” Independent Spirit Award and is repped by WME. He is currently preparing his sophomore feature.
Kelly Diapouli || Kelly is an independent curator and cultural manager in the performing arts sector. In 2009 she founded busart, a non-profit company which focuses its activities in strategic development for the cultural sector, advocacy for the importance of art in social and economic development and the organization of international events. She was the artistic director of Eleusis 2021 European Capital of Culture (Greece) since the initiation of Eleusis candidacy in 2014 to 2020. Currently, she is the artistic director of Larnaka 2030 European Capital of Culture Candidate City (Cyprus).
Nneka Egbuna || Nneka is a communications specialist from Nigeria with a rich experience in African history and its relationship with the rest of the world, Nigerian arts and culture, peace and security. She works in the development and humanitarian sectors remotely and in-person to give visibility and support to causes and people most in need.
Julia Frendo || Julia is an architecture design and research graduate based between Malta and London. She is interested in the intersection of natural landscapes, architecture, modes of inhabitation, and materiality. Central to this thematic focus is the exploration of the relationships between the natural conditions of the ground, resources, and political ecologies. Her practice takes an interdisciplinary approach, driven by research, design, and media experimentation.
Gastronawta || Gastronawta - based on the island on Malta - produces satirical food and cooking shows, to be shared online.
Romeo Roxman Gatt || Romeo is a multidisciplinary artist based between London and Valletta, Malta, whose practice explores sexuality, identity, gender, love and consumption. In recent years, the artist has been working with themes of humanising and interacting with consumer objects, making the inanimate iconic and fetishised.
Samwel Grima || Samwel is an anthropologist researching land governance issues in Maltese agriculture. Through ethnographic fieldwork, he is exploring the ways in which different stakeholders use land in a resource-scarce environment, as well as how they experience the official and unofficial processes that regulate land distribution. By following the discourses of farmers, his research places farmland within an economic, legal, ecological and social nexus in which the values of rural land are changing both from within and from outside the agricultural sector
Bettina Hutschek || Bettina is an artist, film-maker, researcher and speculative thinker, researching alternative histories of the Mediterranean. In her practice, she analyses contemporary questions and concerns, often through storytelling, and translates them into contemporary ‘myths’.
Caldon Mercieca || Caldon studied philosophy and theatre studies at the University of Malta, and has worked in the cultural sector for the past 20 years. Over this period he has collaborated with theatre, visual arts, architecture, and digital arts practitioners, mainly focusing on critical and reflective practices and their relevance to creative work and public engagement. He has participated twice in the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival (2008, 2018) and has published four collections of poetry. His latest work explores the potential of using a semitic language (Maltese) to explore a Taoist perspective on everyday reality, and will be published in November.
Gerald Nestler || Gerald is an artist, writer and curator who combines theory with speculative art practice to explore what he terms the “derivative condition” of contemporary life. Through the lens of data modelling and algorithmic governance, he tests methodologies, narratives and fictions that form a world-producing apparatus and shape the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future.
Andreas Philippopoulos Mihalopoulos || Andreas is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Lab. as well as an artist and writer.
Ira Melkonyan || Ira is a microbiologist, virologist and artist. She is founding member of the rubberbodies collective in Malta and performance artist based in Amsterdam.
Vuk Radulović || Vuk is currently a member of the Novi Sad 2022 – European Capital of Culture Steering Committee, and was previously International Relations Manager and Head of programme development department at Novi Sad – European Capital of culture from 2013 – 2021. He has been an independent expert, working with many bidding ECOCs, including finalist city Banjaluka 2023, and Trenčin 2026.
Elisabeth Schweeger || Elisabeth is currently the Artistic Director of the Bad Ischl - Salzkammergut 2024. She is an accomplished curator, having worked with the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica Linz, Documenta Kassel, OK Linz and Landesgalerie Linz (including DonauArt /HÖHENRAUSCH 2018) among others. She was previously Managing Director-Artistic Director of the Akademie für Darstellende Kunst in Baden-Württemberg.
Stéphanie Roland || Stéphanie is a belgian / micronesian visual artist and filmmaker. After graduating from La Cambre and following Hito Steyerl’s class in UDK Berlin, she completed post-graduates studies at Fresnoy - Studio National. In 2017, she was selected in the group exhibition of the Antarctica Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Working between documentary and the imaginary, she makes films and installations exploring invisible structures, hyperobjects and deep time; from the ecological and political to the geologic and cosmic.
Jordi Vegas Macias || Jordi is an environmental sociologist from Barcelona and is now based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His work as a researcher is focused on the societal developments that affect nature, particularly the dynamics, practices and behaviors that influence the sustainability of the natural and cultural resources in local communities in coastal settings. He is also a consultant in areas related to sustainable tourism, blue circular economy and coastal and marine cultural heritage.
Loranne Vella || Loranne is a Brussels-based Maltese writer, translator and performer, and the co- author of the award-winning fantasy novels The Fiddien Trilogy. She is the author of two eco-fiction novels ‒ Magna TM Mater and Rokit (winner of the National Book Prize, 2018), the short story collection mill-bieb il-ġewwa, and the novel Marta Marta. She is co-founder of Barumbara Collective, a performance art project which focuses on performative events in collaboration with various artists in Malta and abroad.
Exhibition
Julia Frendo | Threading Roots
Gastronawta | Ftira Biż-Żejt
Bettina Hutschek | Aljotta
Stéphanie Roland | Podesta Island
Roxman Gatt | WC
Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler | Alles Hat Grenzen Nur Der Mondfisch Nicht
Virtual Forum || How to (un)make an Island // a Future Island // Past Islands
How to (un)make an Island // a Future Island // Past Islands
20 June 2022 18:00 - 20:00 CET
Farfara2031 takes the procedure of bidding for the title of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) as its research framework. The project imagines the mysterious and semi-fictional island of Farfara as the bidding ‘city’ for the ECoC title, using its virtual (meaning in this case almost-existent) state as the starting point for research into programming and curating for a non-physical, non-existing space.
This first Forum in the project brings together 12 thinkers from different fields to present different aspects of what constitutes an island - real, fictional, historical, or virtual - and possible ideas around (un)making an island, the existence or non-existence of a metaphorical piece of land surrounded by sea, and the ‘is’ness of this ‘is’land.
The Forum will take the form of a series of provocations within four short sessions, which will address the project’s main research question; How can virtuality - understood here as a new form of urban and cultural ‘physicality’ - shape a more radical understanding of what European Capitals of Culture should achieve, by planning a cultural programme for a non-physical place?
Guests: Project collaborators Adnan Hadzi, Gerald Nestler, Rita Orlando, Time’s Up (Tina Auer & Tim Boykett)
IMAGINEISLAND
Island: IS or LAND? What would change if we look ed at the land from the sea’s perspective or more generally, from the nun human perspective . What if we conceptualise d land as a storage of memory ( as in indigenous cultures) rather than its physicality with borders and regimes of all sorts? How can we re imagine our relationship to matters/space/nature/the elements (as a non linear thinking of time and space)?
Andreas Philippopoulos Mihalopoulos || Andreas is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Lab. as well as an artist and writer.
Ira Melkonyan || Ira is a microbiologist, virologist and artist. She is founding member of the rubberbodies collective in Malta and performance artist based in Amsterdam.
Raphael Vella || Raphael is an artis t, educator and curator. He lectures in Art Education, Contemporary Art Practice and Socially Engaged Art at the University of Malta, and is currently coordinating Acting on the Mar gins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS), an international research project studying the impacts of socially engaged arts.
EUROPEISLAND
Europe is made of islands that are physical as well as political, social and cultural. Some islands maintain centrality, others thrive on peripherality. Sometimes, territories shift shape and position, and claim different identities reflecting changing environmental climates and population pressures.
Matti Allam || Matti is co-founder of and manager at Culture Works in Ireland. She is a member of The Capacity Building for European Capitals of Culture (ECoC) pool of multi-disciplinary experts. She previously managed several projects at the Western Development Commission, Galway 2020 and Film London.
Michelle Pace || Michelle is professor in Global Studies at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University. Michelle is Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Europe Program, London, UK and Associate Member at the Middle East Studies Forum, Deakin University, Australia.
Reem Kassem || Reem is cultural manager and producer in Abu Dhabi. She is senior Theatre Programmer at the Cultural Foundation at the Department of Culture and Tourism. She was head of performing arts at the Library of Alexandria, manager of programming at the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation and is founding director of AGORA for Arts and Culture.
METAISLANDS
European Capital of Culture programmes usually call for the live presence of artists and audiences in the ECoC title city - virtuality is often considered as an addendum to the ‘live’ programme. What would this mean for Farfara, an island with no physical space and no borders? How will current and future cross-overs with technology and contemporary modes of creation and distribution shape Farfara’s programme?
Michael Quinton || Michael has completed a PhD in the application of sonification to exo-solar planetary astronomy, i.e. the study and application of UI and UX design principles to effectively convey astronomical data that is meaningful to astronomers. He has worked on numerous sound design and music projects, and is currently researching the use of VR technology in the application of live performance
Paula Guzzanti Ferrer || Paula researches and teaches Technology and Interdisciplinary Performance at the University of Malta, working at the intersections of critical improvisation studies, collaborative performance-making, affect theory, and conflict transformation studies.
Maria Galea || Maria is an art advisor and creative entrepreneur. Motivated by the need to tackle challenges within the creative industry, she applies the use of innovative business models and technology, while being a source of inspiration to artists and creative leaders in general.
UN-MAKE-IS-LANDS-S
In deconstructing an island, so its elements are laid bare; poesis is seen in reverse. Something is brought into being through chance combinations of culture, climate, location, resources. If something can be made, can it be imagined differently through new thinking & new media?
Un-making - is making safe - it’s only what doesn’t exist that cannot be destroyed
Bettina Hutschek || Bettina is an artist, film-maker, researcher and speculative thinker, researching alternative histories of the Mediterranean. In her practice, she analyses contemporary questions and concerns, often through storytelling, and translates them into contemporary ‘myths’.
Colm Regan || Colm is a human rights activist, engaging in education to tackle climate change and climate change migration.
Max Haarig || Max is a citizen of the Republic of Užupis, founded in 1998, along with its own flag, currency, president, cabinet of ministers, and a constitution. The Užupis Constitution for the Age of AI, building a bridge between arts and technology, is currently exhibited at Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta.
Supported by Arts Council Malta’s Digital Research and Development Scheme and the Cultural Diplomacy Fund of the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs and Trade.
Workshop || How to (un)make an Island // a Future Island // Past Islands
How to Un/Make an Island
Friday 24 June 2022 at 3pm - 6pm
The workshop is planned as a conceptual development exercise for the very beginning of a fictional Bid Book. In a normal ECoC bidding process, each city answers a set of questions around its suitability for the title and presents them to the European Commission’s panel of evaluators in a Bid Book.
We have asked the Austria-based collective Time’s Up to run the workshop, and to guide our invited participants through a collaborative visioning process. Time’s Up specialise in constructing collaborative and interactive situations, and encouraging playful, experience-driven research processes, using tools from diverse disciplines. The outcomes of the workshop would ultimately contribute to the project’s fictional online Bid Book.
Supported by Arts Council Malta’s Digital Research and Development Scheme and the Cultural Diplomacy Fund of the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs and Trade.
