2026

Residency Dates
5 October - 2 November 2026

Residency Location
Tal -Qortin, Marsalforn, Gozo

Studio Location
Announced Soon

Residency Launch
10 September 2026| Time tbc

Residency Closing
tbc

Events
tbc

Beyond What Drifts Us Apart
a MagiC Carpets project

Beyond What Drifts Us Apart (BWDUA) is a multi-year interdisciplinary research and residency-based project developed by Elyse Tonna that explores the less dominant narratives embedded within the environments surrounding Malta’s historic (300-year-old+) coastal towers. As the colonial legacies that built them fade, these structures now stand within fragile and shifting ecologies, where human interventions and non-human communities continue to shape each other.

Guided by ecological thinking and a decolonial mindset, BWDUA reconsiders inherited legacies of these landscapes, focusing on the interplay between the visible and invisible, the natural and de-/constructed. It addresses concepts related to extractive capitalism, contested land use, identity and environmental degradation, asking how past infrastructures underpin today’s ecological instability. Post-anthropocentric perspectives frame the project’s approach, prioritising climate justice, bio-cultural diversity and the dismantling of human-centred perspectives in favour of coexistence.

This year’s chosen site invites an intense examination of Tal-Qortin, Marsalforn on the island of Gozo – a littoral site that is also multi-faceted, encompassing agricultural plots used for grazing, private fields, a nearby scrapyard and a recreational zone on a rehabilitated landfill site.

At Tal-Qortin, the absence of a standing tower structure becomes the curator and artists’ point of departure; the collapsed towers and their uncertain footprints foreground questions of territorial marking, land reprogramming and the afterlives of defence, communication and waste. Post-anthropocentric perspectives frame the project’s approach, prioritising climate justice, bio-cultural diversity and the dismantling of human-centred perspectives in favour of coexistence.

In 2026, the project residency invites artists Julian Micallef (MT), Martina Georgina (MT), Bettina Hutschek (DE), Sébastien Schnyder (CH) to investigate how the site’s transformations affect both material conditions and collective memory and how non-human systems respond to engineered ground and reconfigured terrain.