Treasures from Malta

Joseph Paul Cassar is an artist and art historian whose studies have taken him from Africa to Australia, and he now resides and lectures in North America. He is a specialist on African and Modern European art and lectures at prestigious institutions and Universities in and around Washington DC. But his heart lies in the modern period of Maltese art, and amongst his many, many published studies he has produced two landmark publications that chart the rise of modernism in the visual arts ...

Michael Zammit is a poet and a philosopher who has a tendency to look East. He has mastered the difficult language of Sanskrit, and has studied and written extensively about it. He draws lessons from the great philosophical traditions of the East and finds connections with that of the West, using the East as his starting point. He has translated and adapted into Maltese a number of texts including several for the theatre and continues to lecture on both Western and Eastern philosophy in vario...

Vicki Ann Cremona is a prolific and distinguished academic who originally studied and taught French. In time she was drawn to theatre studies and dance, and has approached them from so many angles through her research and papers ranging from the architecture of theatres, to costume, to carnival. She has written extensively on these subjects and much more besides. She is without doubt the leading authority on the history of carnival in Malta and has produced a seminal book on the subject. She ...

Gillian Zammit is elegance personified. Her petite frame belies the incredibly powerful singing voice that has made her a household name. Her musical repertoire is vast and she is equally comfortable singing Baroque opera as she is with 20th century compositions. She has worked alongside such greats as Placido Domingo and Joseph Calleja and sung to much acclaim in the US and across the major capitals of Europe. She is consistently lauded in reviews and while her musical prowess is at its peak...

Philip Farrugia Randon is somewhat of a polymath with a multi-faceted career. He graduated as a lawyer in 1973, while simultaneously broadcasting programmes on radio and tv. Throughout his working life as a lawyer, specializing in banking law, he has engaged constantly with the arts. He is a practicing watercolourist as well as an art connoisseur who has penned countless articles and many books about amongst others, Caravaggio and J.M.W. Turner. He is a published poet and author. He has occup...

Lorenzo Agius is a celebrity photographer of Maltese descent. His roots are in art and art history but early on in his career he took up photography as his medium, working his way up from photography assistant to a fully-fledged freelance photographer. For decades now he has specialized in portraiture and fashion. Throughout his career, he has produced iconic images of practically all the most celebrated actors and models of our time, sometimes revisiting these sitters through different shoot...

Vince Briffa made the cross-over from industry to the academic field, while maintaining an art practice that has established him as one of the leading lights in the contemporary visual arts in Malta. He has attended numerous prestigious international art residencies. He has been invited to participate in countless exhibitions with important international artists and continues to explore the visual arts in both new media, and traditional media such as sculpture and painting. In 2002 he was ins...

Scenic artist Carmel Said has had a remarkable career. From art studies in Malta he went on to obtain further art degrees in London where he worked his way up to become one of the finest scenic artists, producing incredible sets that are beautiful works of painting and sculpture for the biggest names in the industry. From Paris to New York, if you spot a beautiful shop window, say at Louis Vuitton or Dior, it is likely to have been produced by Scenic Sets, his busy London workshop which he fo...

Renzo Spiteri is a multi-percussionist, composer and improviser, a multimedia artist, a field recordist, sound designer, and arts collaborator. In essence he is a sound artist who seems to have no restrictions, such is his versatility and the extent of his experimentation. Literally every and any particular sound can be turned into music in his hands. His practice has taken him all over the world collaborating with persons working in all the arts, from the visual to the performative to the wr...

Dr Joan Abela is synonymous with archives. She is a well published historian who achieved distinction throughout her academic journey and now in turn fires up her students with enthusiasm for the past. She has wowed us with her many discoveries, her incredible, infectious passion for the past but most of all her almost militant attitude to combat neglect and defend archives and their collections with extraordinary zeal. Her conviction about preserving at all costs, in the face of a laissez-fa...

Nico Conti is a ceramic artist who is working clay in exciting, radical new ways. From his undergraduate days at MCAST in Malta to finishing top of his class at the Royal College of Art in 2019, he has continually excelled. In the short space of a few years he has won numerous prestigious awards and scholarships. He is represented by major galleries and has already exhibited in craft fairs where his work was singled out for praise. His name is now synonymous with 3d printing, but his wo...

Daniel Cilia is one of Malta’s foremost photographers. His artistry is much admired, going to great lengths not only to record what might soon disappear, but making seemingly impossible photographs that continuously elicit awe and wonder from his ever growing fan base. He is a Gozitan with a deep love for his birth island. Through his photography, and, it must be said, incessant curiosity he has made several discoveries and proposed theories about cultural conundrums. He has also increasingly...

Rug and interiors designer Suzanne Sharp has had a very colourful career! Together with her husband, Christopher, she has risen to become one of the leading exponents in rug design internationally. Her roots are Maltese, and indeed the first shop that set the couple on their incredibly successful design path, was a shop they opened in Sliema. Since then they have never looked back, establishing the Rug Company and growing their business in several areas. From retailing traditional oriental ru...

Timmy Gambin is a maritime archaeologist and an associate professor at the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta. His interest is specifically in wrecks that lie deep below Maltese waters - whether they are ancient or date to World War II you can be sure he has either discovered them or knows all there is to know about them. He has directed several underwater surveys not only in Maltese waters but also in Spain, Italy, Croatia and other parts of the Mediterranean b...

Matty Cremona is an accomplished cook and food history writer. She has written four books and numerous articles about the history of food and the context of dining in Malta. Her knowledge of Malta’s food history, honed through years of research both in the archives and in her kitchen, has revealed new information and translated these old writings into modern-day doable recipes. The interest in food, what it means and how we prepared and ate it in the past, is universal. But Matty Cremona take...

Anna Borg Cardona is a musician and music researcher whose eyes fire up with incredible excitement whenever she talks about the discoveries she keeps making in our many rich historic archives here in Malta. Through the decades she has discovered musicians and musical instrument makers from the past, she has uncovered and played long forgotten sheet music, and pieced together much of Malta’s rich ethnographic music history. She has lectured extensively at the University and delivered many publ...

Prof. Joe Friggieri is a philosopher, a playwright, a theatre director, a poet and an author, not to mention a person who has been an influencer in the arts in Malta from decades before an influencer became ‘a thing’. He has packed all of this into a very industrious lifetime that commenced its academic trajectory with Ph.D.s from both Milan and Oxford, followed by a professorship at the University of Malta. On a parallel with his academic career, he has written and directed numerous plays, h...

Wayne Marshall is a conductor, pianist and organist of great international repute. He has performed widely in all of the principal concert halls and opera houses around the world, both as conductor and pianist, and sometimes simultaneously ! He is celebrated for his interpretation of Gershwin and Bernstein and other 20th century composers however his repertoire is actually far greater than that. His achievements have earned him numerous plaudits and earlier this year he was honoured with an O...

In this podcast episode, we meet a knight! Frà John Edward Critien is a professed member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the only Maltese to have ever been elevated to the highest ranks of this International Order. For several years he lived in the Order’s Headquarters at the historic Palazzo Malta in Rome where he was Conservator of the Magistral Palace Library and Archives and Curator of the art collections of the Order. In 2000 he moved to Malta to take up residence at F...

Giovanni Bonello has distinguished himself in both culture and the law. In culture he has left an indelible mark in researching, discovering and publishing his countless finds. He has provided new angles on the history of art in Malta as well as writing about myriad aspects of Maltese history. He has also written about the law, both critiques of contemporary judgements as well as delving into aspects of legal and constitutional history. As a human rights lawyer in the 80s he was at the ...

Kim Dalli is an actress who has worked as a journalist in real life, as well as inhabiting the role in Herman Grech’s recent play ‘They Blew Her Up’. Her love for writing has also been directed towards script-writing and in this podcast she tells us about a very special project she is currently working on that casts her in the multi-faced role of researcher, script-writer and actor. Kim is passionate about the history of women and is channeling this interest into the discovery of war-tim...

Alex Camilleri is a Maltese-American film director who is particularly inspired by Malta and has set his debut film, LUZZU, in Malta. And what a film ! LUZZU became the first Maltese film to show at the highly prestigious Sundance film festival earning positive reviews. The lead actor, Jesmark Scicluna, a real life fisherman with no previous training in acting, won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award in acting at Sundance. LUZZU has gone on to be selected for the New Directors/New Fi...

Richard England is embedded in the national psyche as the Starchitect from Malta. He has won several international awards for his architectural work. He has been honoured by States, by various Universities and by all of the important international architectural associations. But beyond architecture, which is perhaps his most public face, he is a man of many parts. In this podcast we discuss not only his iconic buildings but also his poetry, art, writings and his remarkable record collection a...

Marquis Nicholas de Piro is the founder of the beautiful Casa Rocca Piccola House Museum in Valletta. He has opened his home to the public to share the many decades of shrewd art collecting. He was years ahead in recognising and appreciating various decorative art forms and unfashionable pieces of art well before others jumped onto the bandwagon. He was instrumental in the revival of the art of lacemaking by creating a competition for contemporary makers while collecting the very finest piece...

Andrew Alamango is a musician and archivist who has been the driving force behind Etnika, the band that reworked Maltese folk music and got the younger generation dancing to its beat. He also set up Malta’s Lost Voices, to make the earliest recordings of Maltese music accessible to the public, as well as creating the Magna Zmien project which digitizes old photographs, audio and audio visual material from private collections before it is all lost. He breathes new life into these old records b...

Miriam Gauci is an outstanding Maltese soprano who made it big on the international stage. From her formative years at Milan’s La Scala she never looked back, appearing time and again in leading roles in all the major opera houses worldwide. She has worked with the world’s foremost conductors such as Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti and directors like Franco Zeffirelli and starred alongside the likes of Plácido Domingo. In this conversation with Fran Balzan, she opens up about the highs...

Tuning in from leafy Surrey, we meet with Dr Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel, dance historian, academic and author. From her early days twirling around the dining room chairs, Kathrina’s love for dance has grown and grown. It has driven her to pursue her studies in the U.K. and to forge an academic career that not only saw her lecturing in the area of dance studies but also culminated in several publications and her present role as Head of Research within the Faculty of Education of the Royal Academy...

When he’s not examining artworks, writing books, curating exhibitions or lecturing, Prof. Keith Sciberras is invariably to be found in an archive. And with good reason. He’s made several discoveries and his infectious enthusiasm for all the surprises that a careful trawl through the archives yields, bubbles over in this conversation. Whether he’s speaking about Caravaggio or carpets (those depicted in still lifes!) you can tell that he’s always on the brink of a discovery and likes nothing be...

Bernie Mizzi is on a lifelong mission to infect everyone with a love for the arts. As an educator she has been in a unique position to do so. In this conversation, she tells us all about her career in education, from school head to Pro-Chanceller at the University of Malta and various positions besides. These enabled her to influence arts programming in education whether at policy level or on the ground as a teacher in direct contact with students. And as if that weren’t enough, she’s set up ...

Whether above water or below, Kurt Arrigo’s photographs have wowed us for decades. His photography has taken him to the furthest corners of the earth, and, not content with that, he dove deep in distant oceans to bring the underworld to us through his lens. We discuss playing with (huge) baby whales, daredevilry and adventure, near shaves and breathtaking adventure – all in the service of taking that show-stopping shot. No wonder then, that Kurt has won several prestigious international award...

A career in book and paper conservation has taken Theresa Zammit Lupi from Sinai to Switzerland, Cambridge UK to Cambridge Massachusetts and many other places besides. We catch up with her in this first episode of the newly launched podcast series, Treasures from Malta, hosted by Francesca Balzan and produced by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti. Theresa takes us on a whirlwind tour of the incredible paper treasures she has worked on. We delve into her ground-breaking research, publications and ac...