Valletta

An essential aspect of the festival involves the development of workshops centered around the audiovisual experience on board the catamaran. These workshops are designed to address three key themes: cultural diversity, environmental sustainability and gender equality. Suitable for children aged 5 to 11, the activities are inspired by an audiovisual experience highlighting artifacts from the Louvre, encouraging active engagement, conversation and participatory learning.

Home is where you'll find _____ What is home, and where is it? This informal discussion will focus on the idea of displacement. What exactly does it mean to be displaced? The person? Their collective memory? Their history? And in their new environment, is displacement still present? Three panelists from diverse backgrounds will discuss these questions and more. Literary readings will punctuate the discussion.

EVOCAZIONI E INVOCAZIONI – RITUAL SONGS FROM ASTROMONTE Davide Ambrogio skillfully captures the vast tapestry of Mediterranean culture, spanning from Albania to Greece, from Italy to the Arab world. Raised in a small town in Aspromonte, a mountainous territory in the extreme southwest of Italy, in Calabria, Davide was surrounded by ancient religious rituals and devotional chants that are still very much alive. Tethered to his Calabrian roots, he drew inspiration from the oral traditions of the region to create his distinctive musical language.

Often credited with the revival of Maltese sung pop music, Brikkuni have been around since their seminal 2008 debut Kuntrabanda – a genre-hopping pop/rock/punk hybrid that transformed the band into a local cult phenomenon and ushered in a new wave of Maltese alternative music.

The vibrant multiculturalism of Malta, coupled with a shared passion for Latin rhythms, served as the catalyst for the collaboration between Marco Strafalaci from Italy and Patricia Torres from Uruguay. This unique fusion led to the creation of the musical project known as the Vento y Fogo duo. Their repertoire, spanning from South American tunes to Spanish, Italian, and beyond, invites the audience on a captivating journey through the joyful flavours of Mediterranean and Latin musicality.

The first week-end of the Art Explora Festival Malta stopover, on March 23rd and 24th, will launch a new programme named “Ocean Weekends”. In Malta, these 2 days of programming will be co-curated with the Malta Biennale and the curators Sofia Baldi Pighi, Emma Mattei and Andrew Borg Wirth. The Ocean Week-end in La Valletta will invite the audience to a series of round tables, film screenings, and inspiring talks, gathering key speakers from the art and sciences worlds around the issue of ocean climate emergency.  

CAN YOU SEA? Water as a political body - The Land/Sea dialectic omnipresent in maritime anthropology - Colonialism, independence, developmental and conservation policies have all disrupted communities inhabiting maritime space.  - The concept of the sea as a human space, marked by cultural diversity, has been stubbornly resisted.  - Access, ownership and protection of the ocean by shifting the dominant western model of ideas about the sea and opening up a middle way – a space for reflection that is scientific, political, social, creative.