Last Friday (March 14) Memoirs from the Future, a solo exhibition by Roderick Camilleri, opened at MUŻA.
Head of the Malta School of Art, Camilleri’s interdisciplinary visual art practice explores themes related to ontology, metaphysics and materiality, and in this show, through several types of work, he offers a vision of an imagined dystopian future. It’s a future that’s dark and uneasy, irrevocably shaped by ecological destruction, climate migration, and environmental decay and the works capture universal anxieties about current climate change and the displacement of people.
Populated by drifting nomads, drawing on visual imagery from various cultures, Camilleri’s monochrome drawings, etchings and woodcut prints show a stark world that echoes with uncertainty. He explores this place in a sombre and powerful way that’s contemplative rather than dynamic, and, taking the viewer on a journey, they trigger a vivid and visceral sense of loneliness and melancholy.
The first series of works, ‘Blurred Vision’, is a set of graphic drawings that explore the concept of a future shrouded in uncertainty. The edgy drawings are sketchy and unsettling: scratchy and uncomfortable with bold hatched lines, they evoke ideas of barbed wire and no-man’s land. There is no stopping for the desperate characters depicted here.
In the second ‘chapter’, the energy changes as the ‘refugees’ of Space 1 become etched ‘nomads’, ghostly figures who are perhaps beginning to navigate their way through this dark and misty future. This shift into works that appear more finished signifies, albeit indistinctly, the enduring human spirit that we find in ourselves in times of difficulty.
The mood shifts yet again, in the third room. Future Pipe Dreams is a collection of works that delves into the post-apocalyptical world of these figures, some of whom are wearing gas masks, in an elemental environment of rock and water. With the clear lines and heavy contrasts typical of woodcut prints, there’s a feeling of solidity and even hope: a stunning print of a seated woman – perhaps the only person in the show who is not shown with an indistinct character or science-fiction flavour – speaks of the potential of rebirth and beauty in this post-anthropocene world.
And so, with this dual narrative of ruin and resilience, Camilleri’s imagery aims to blur the line between documentation and warning. “These works serve not just as speculative fiction, but as cautionary artifacts-traces of a world shaped by human excess and environmental neglect,” he says.
What’s of additional note in Memoirs of the Future, is that the viewers are also able to join Camilleri as he looks back – in tune with the exhibition’s title – at the creative journey. The final part of the show offers an insight into the artist’s process as he prepared the pieces for this exhibition. On one wall he focuses on a particularly lyrical image in the collection to illustrate the stages of the woodcut process, showing his progression from sketch to finished printing plate via artist’s proofs. The ordered flow from rough outline to a finished work that’s both measured and peaceful seems to be a gentle reflection of the way he has depicted the world in this exhibition, adding a focus on this glimmer of hope in a dystopian world. All is not lost.
On a second wall hang two sculptural reliefs, Present Tense, (think Hans Solo at the start of The Return of the Jedi) – asking, for me, a question about whether we are – or will become – frozen in time. In two showcases between, Camilleri also presents the woodcut and intaglio plates he used. Alongside a large projected video of the artist in his studio, they provide great insight into different materials and printmaking methods he used.
In this way, Camilleri reminds us of the value of art in today’s world, and presumably in the future of mankind, whatever that holds, within an exhibition reminding of the precarious nature of humanity’s relationship with its environment. Quietly powerful, this visual socio-ecological commentary is both a record of thoughts – or fragments from an envisaged future – and a call to action, before today’s reality turns into tomorrow’s dystopian memory.
Memoirs of the Future runs at MUŻA until April 18. It is free to visit.