Words by Sarah Chircop
We leave our sunny table at Apple’s Eye behind, remnants of cold beer and chips mingling with the growing hum of a Friday evening. Summer is edging towards an end, but Golden Bay is still packed with bodies, beached, bathing or bored. The air smells of sea salt and cheap sunblock, but I tell myself we’ve still got time.
The car park is its usual chaos, an entanglement of cars, feet, melting ice creams, and bus routes that fill up before they even start. But Elyse and I take off on foot. I remind myself why I love to walk and not drive, free to move at the pace of the land. We start climbing the long, winding road towards Għajn Tuffieħa, then veer right onto a narrow path. I had walked this trail back in May, the air sharp but with a hint of summer, me underdressed and stubbornly jacket-less eager for the season’s change. The winds of the west coast have their own language; they move through you, sometimes gently, sometimes with the kind of force that drifts you apart.
Elyse walks slightly ahead, eyes scanning things I don’t see quite yet. She talks about this place, this stretch of land, the end of this valley. One of Malta’s richest valleys, she reminds me, where so much of our natural produce is still cultivated. She continues to map the terrain; ridges, folds, roots of hills that dive deep into the limestone and clay before disappearing beneath the sea.
“It’s a fragile balance,” she says, “but it endures, the land keeps finding ways to live with us, and despite us.”
That, I realise, is where Beyond What Drifts Us Apart begins. Curated by Elyse Tonna and produced by Unfinished Art Space, the project returns this year to Majjistral Nature and History Park, surrounding the 17th-century Għajn Tuffieħa (Riviera) Tower; a relic of watchfulness now closed to the public, standing as both witness and warning.
“When we can’t enter,” Elyse tells me, “we start to listen, to what’s around, what’s growing, what’s being forgotten, and we imagine new worlds.” Guided by ecological thinking and a decolonial mindset, Elyse’s curatorial vision doesn’t seek to impose but to translate, to act as a mediator between human and non-human, past and present, listening for what the land itself is asking for.
That act, of shifting focus, of turning outward, lies at the heart of this year’s residency. The artists chosen each listen to the land in different ways, tracing overlooked narratives that ripple across the coastline. Their work doesn’t just inhabit the site; it learns from it. And the residency does just that. It shifts attention from the built to the living, from the tower’s stone shell currently surrounding scaffolding to the ecologies that breathe around it, the wind-carved cliffs, the bees, the roots, the unseen lives beneath our steps. The participating artists; Martina Farrugia, Nicole Borg (through her ongoing project Indiġikċina) in collaboration with Noah Fabri, and Giulia Iacolutti, each enter the site through a different portal.
Martina traces the sensory and political layers of the valley, building tactile and technological archives that record what the eye misses. Nicole and Noah explore food as connection and care, cooking and conversing to reimagine systems of labour and nourishment. Giulia dives into the delicate edge between sea and cliff, where erosion and collapse expose the fragility of our coastal worlds. Together, their works form a constellation, a series of gestures toward coexistence, entanglement, and the more-than-human rhythms that hold us in place.
As we walk, the landscape around us feels alive in a way that language can barely touch; everything participating, nothing still. It feels like what the project’s manifesto calls “a slow unfolding of attention,” being with the place rather than mastering it, a way of walking that listens. Elyse speaks about the post-human, not as theory but as a way of seeing; to acknowledge that the land, too, in its slow movements, creates.
We stand next to the tower for a while, scaffolding and all, and recall attending an impromptu end-of-summer rave here a few years ago, scaffolding already up, winds loud and dancing with us. Then, just as the light begins to deepen, we turn down towards where we began. On the cliff’s edge, a group of women have set up what looks like a luxury picnic,pale linen blankets, silver cutlery, champagne flutes. A group of women dressed in white arrive excitedly. Then, suddenly, the loud rumble of a tractor starts up behind them. It lurches into motion, ploughing the dry land, dust rising in gold clouds. The contrast is startling, hilarious really. The women lift their phones to capture the sunset, but the light, of course, escapes the frame. The land keeps moving, uncaring, alive.
We keep walking. Perhaps that’s what Beyond What Drifts Us Apart gestures toward; how the natural and unnatural, the human and non-human, the beautiful and the unsettling, are always in conversation. How coexistence is not harmony, but the friction that makes living possible.
By the time we’re halfway back, the horizon has begun to swallow the sun. I hadn’t realised how quickly the light would fade, a sign that summer is ending I suppose. We find a safe spot on the cliff’s edge and sit for a moment, the sea stretching wide in front of us. For a while, neither of us speaks. My eyes take it in and stretch, far and beyond, into the horizon and that space between day and night, the place where what connects us is still forming, not to resolve, but to remain.
For a moment, we share a dream.
Beyond What Drifts Us Apart, curated by Elyse Tonna and produced by Unfinished Art Space, unfolded over four weeks at Majjistral Nature and History Park in September and October 2025. The project is part of the MagiC Carpets Platform, co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program. The Platform brings together 17 European cultural organisations, coordinated by Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, offering opportunities for emerging artists to explore little-known areas and to create – together with local communities – new works that bring to light regional particularities and traditions.
In collaboration with Majjistral Park, Din L’Art Helwa & Latitudo Art Projects
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