On the Mediterranean archipelago of Malta, limestone is so omnipresent that it tinges life a pale golden glow. Used as a building material for centuries – from Bronze Age megalithic temples to the Baroque St John’s Co-Cathedral and 19th-century British barracks – it is ingrained in the history of architecture, material culture and aesthetics.
The 21st century has brought some shifts in this landscape, however. Urbanisation has seen globalised designs of concrete and cladding displacing limestone buildings and, with them, any sense of local context and culture. More than 60 quarries on the 316 sq km main island have now surpassed their peak potential, leaving behind vast and redundant sinkholes in the land: the local limestone that has defined architecture for millennia is now considered finite.
Without an abundance of material to realise their own visions in limestone, Malta’s new and future generations of artists and architects have been left with the dust, the impressions and the remnants. It’s a scenario that has given rise to questions about how to forge new relationships to this land that are authentic yet mindful of the changing environment.
For this year’s London Design Biennale, the creative team behind Malta’s pavilion – including curator and architect Andrew Borg Wirth and architect Anthony Bonnici – decided to work with an innovative reconstituted-limestone material called Recobel developed by manufacturer Halmann Vella. Made of 70 per cent limestone dust, it is the same pale, golden colour as the natural material yet stronger and less erosive, thus offering a solution to how to respect the local vernacular for decades to come.
The limestone dust and the way it’s transformed into stone – poured where the real thing is hewn – have inspired a radical object that reflects the landscape of the future as well as society itself. The 2.4m-wide orb is a sculptural communal urn, formed by the poured ashes of a community, slowly accumulating layers of souls over time. Cremation was illegal in Malta until 2019 and although the country is strongly Catholic, with a religious calendar inseparable from life, younger generations largely identify as agnostic or atheist. This inclusive, secular object symbolises a death practice that reaches beyond religion.
Placed at the bottom of a quarry, an inverse cathedral where time seems to stop, it becomes the focus of a ritualistic procession that echoes Malta’s historic, performative mourning practices, one that has been imagined and captured by art director Matthew Attard Navarro, filmmaker Stephanie Sant and photographer Anne Immelé.
‘Urna is rooted in reality, but manifested through art practice and fantasy, using narratives to explain how an object can shift societal norms with a universal concept that transcends any particular one religion and embraces a more contemporary society in a more diverse way,’ says curator Borg Wirth, whose masters thesis explored cremation, geology, construction and waste. As part of the project, in collaboration with students at Malta University, they imagined urnae in places from Johannesburg to Chicago, each formed of local materials and rituals.
In our ever-approaching dystopian future of diminishing natural resources, perhaps Urna also represents a death of material culture as we know it. ‘Modernism was a vase, Postmodernism broke it – now we have to deal with the fragments,’ says architect Bonnici, who designed Urna with architects Tanil Raif and Thomas Mifsud. Now these fragments are finding their own language.
Clusters of foraged materials from landscapes of construction debris have found new poetry and meaning in the work of Maltese artists, blending Arte Povera, Land art and Brutalism. Gozitan artist Victor Agius scours construction sites for red ochre, roots, terrarossa and boulders for his sculptural and performative works; while Ray Pitrè (1940–2024) collected metal rods discarded during the building boom of the late 1960s for his introspective sculptures that explore the liminal spaces of human experience.
Similarly, fresh architectural perspectives are being applied to abandoned spaces, redundant heritage and forgotten ruins: ‘Are quarries scars on the landscape? Or new spaces to occupy?’ asks architect Bonnici. Informed by voids and caves, his work under the studio Ebejer Bonnici is readdressing architecture’s relationship with the land – carving subterranean levels in steep valley sites and imagining skyscrapers as chasms. Borg Wirth has repurposed a former reservoir into a swimming pool beneath his garden; a cool, atmospheric, golden shell inside which he likes to work.
Across the island, new cultural institutions are reconstituting old limestone structures with new layers. At the Malta International Contemporary Art Space, a metal exhibition framework is suspended within a heritage-listed 17th-century gunpowder magazine, which later became an asylum – now it is inhabited by large-scale installations by the likes of Joana Vasconcelos and a shop designed by Forma Fantasma. On Gozo island, NIDUM Architects has designed a contemporary architecture that consolidates a 1960s Modernist school and a rediscovered archeological site into the new Gozo Museum of Archaeology, currently under construction.
‘Urna positions us in a longer timeline that expresses a sense of understanding and connection with the landscape we have created,’ says Borg Wirth. Yet what does this fragmentary, sedimentary accumulation of construction and creation say of this generation and century? How might this layer be read by future generations?
The weight of the past is certainly heavy – it’s built of limestone boulders and blocks, after all – but there is certainly lightness and joy found in the opportunity for its reinvention and re-evaluation – best experienced driving in a 4x4 down a dusty stone road that winds down ten storeys deep into an empty quarry that, on arrival, feels like a peacefully all-encompassing three-dimensional desert. Here, heritage, memory, spirituality remain, yet a gold-tinged void opens up for new materials, rituals and expressions.
‘Urna’ was presented at the Malta Pavilion at the London Design Biennale (5–29 June 2025), It was commissioned by Arts Council Malta and responds to the biennale theme, ‘Surface Reflections’, set by director Samuel Ross. The ‘Urna’ creative team includes Andrew Borg Wirth, Anthony Bonnici, Tanil Raif, Matthew Attard Navarro, Anne Immelé, Stephanie Sant and Thomas Mifsud
