Ritratt: Keit Bonnici

Tista’ taqra bil-
Malti.

Maltese artist Keit Bonnici critiqued Malta’s tumultuous relationship with nature and open green spaces by having a ‘vertical picnic’ on the Marsa Ħamrun Bypass’s green wall.

This wall was part of a €500,000 investment in the Marsa-Ħamrun Bypass, with 27,600 plants that were planted on the longest vertical garden in Malta, on a wall 350 meters long, the size of three football stadiums, which was built in 2018.

Malta’s longest green wall; 27,600 plants to give life to Marsa Ħamrun bypass

The Nationalist Party had strongly criticised the Labour government over the failure of a €600,000 green wall project, calling it a clear example of financial mismanagement and poor planning.

In a statement, the opposition accused the government of squandering taxpayer money on an unsustainable environmental initiative that has now been abandoned.

On his social media profiles, Bonnici said that came up with this project after not managing to find a horizontal green space.

Instead, he found a vertical green, and decided to make ‘a vertical picnic’.

The installation, called ‘Sunset Picnic’, reimagines what being nature could look like, with Bonnici explaining that the work ‘displaces the quintessentially horizontal social practice of picnicking onto vertical architectural planes’.

He said that this vertical relocation ‘problematises the scarcity of local ground-level green commons and suggests a relationship with verticality within the urban context defined by spatial fragmentation and environmental precarity’.

This project was launched a few weeks after controversy erupted in June when actor Thomas Camilleri posted before-and-after photographs showing the transformation of the popular family area, where large sections of grass were replaced with gravel.

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