A Place That Fades, a new exhibition at MUZA by Giola Cassar, reflects on the disappearance of domestic gardens from our urban spaces, a loss that has far-reaching ecological, cultural and psychological repercussions.
This is Giola’s second solo exhibition which, curated by Elyse Tonna, unfolds as a quiet, reflective environment. It is composed of more than 250 photographic prints on fabric, each of which was created using a delicate and unstable process that reflected the exhibition’s central theme of impermanence: images appear only partially, often blurred or faded, resisting clarity and permanence. Each print is an imprint of a dried leaf collected from private gardens: fragments of spaces that are increasingly inaccessible or disappearing altogether.
Rather than reconstruct what has been lost, A Place That Fades offers a space for contemplation – inviting visitors to engage with absence, memory and the quiet erosion of everyday green spaces. It gestures towards the overlooked, the peripheral and the fragile traces that remain. In doing so, it prompts a broader reflection on what it means personally, collectively and ecologically – when these once-intimate landscapes begin to vanish from our lives.
“I grew up with access to a garden that was also my playground, a place to imagine, to dream, to be alone or together,” says Giola. “It was only when I lived without access to green space that I truly understood the impact it had on my well-being. Becoming a mother deepened this awareness, recognising how increasingly rare and precious these spaces are for future generations. The garden, I’ve come to realise, is more than a space. It’s a threshold between worlds, a quietly radical ecology of remembrance.”
Giola explains that she has focused on domestic gardens because they are often overlooked, and are seen as too ordinary to be protected, too private to be mourned. “But these modest spaces hold so much,” she comments. “They’re micro-ecologies and archives of human and non-human relationships. They are layered with memory, rituals, and sensory experiences. Their disappearance is not sudden but cumulative, a slow unravelling of meaning, community, and biodiversity.”
“We often focus on environmental loss on a large scale, but this project is about smaller, everyday absences. The domestic. The unnoticed. Many homes used to have at least a small patch of soil, a tree, or a corner of green. These details may have seemed modest, but they shaped how we moved through our days. As they disappear, they change how we live, how we remember, and how we connect to our surroundings.”
“The disappearance of domestic gardens isn’t just an environmental concern it’s symbolic of deeper cultural shifts. Their loss reflects a broader disconnection from the natural world and from each other. As gardens are replaced by apartment blocks, we lose not only biodiversity but places of refuge, play, and contemplation. These spaces have always been more than ornamental: they’re where human and non-human lives intersect in meaningful ways. Their erasure speaks of privatisation, of the prioritisation of profit over people, and of an unsettling diminishment of collective experience.”
“On the street where I grew up, most of the houses have been demolished and replaced with apartment blocks. With them, the gardens vanished—those spaces where we played, where birds nested, where so many quiet memories lived. This triggered a deep reflection on what it means to lose not just a place, but the relationships and rhythms it held.”
“My childhood home still stands, but its future feels uncertain. That uncertainty shaped the entire project. It began with personal grief and expanded into a broader inquiry into how we hold space, memory, and ecological connection in a rapidly changing world.”
“I chose leaves as a central motif because they embody this tension between loss and resilience. Even after being severed from their source, they remain visually stunning. In their fragility, there is power. In their drying, a kind of transformation. The way they dry and curl speaks of quiet resistance. They become like maps of time, of transformation, of decay.”
“Leaves are often at the background, but here they become protagonists. Severed from their branches, they still retain their form ghosts of life once connected to a larger system. They speak to memory, disconnection, and fragility, but also endurance. In a sense, they are like us trying to hold form as the world changes.”
The acetone transfer process that Giola used to create the prints mirrors this: unstable, partial, always fading. “The process of making the acetone prints was incredibly labour-intensive,” she smiles. “Every print is unique, and the materials were temperamental. There were many failures, faded images, torn fabric but those imperfections became part of the work’s language. They echoed the very idea I was trying to explore: how nothing stays the same, and how even in fading, something remains.”
And in this way, in A Place That Fades, is about much more than gardens. It’s about the invisible thresholds we cross as our environment shifts about the liminal space between memory and absence, between presence and forgetting. It is an invitation to pause, to look closer, and to ask what it means when places of refuge, for both humans and non-humans, begin to dissolve.
