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Raphael Vella works as an artist, curator, and professor of art education and socially engaged art at the University of Malta. His interdisciplinary practice focuses on political themes and institutions related to medicine, education, and care. He has exhibited his work around the world – from New Zealand through the USA to Argentina. In 2017, he was co-curator of the Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and in 2024 he was selected for the first edition of the Malta Biennale. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and is the author or co-author of the books Artist-Teachers in Context: International Dialogues, Art – Ethics – Education, and Documents of Socially Engaged Art.

In 2017, together with German artist and curator Bettina Hutschek, you prepared the Malta Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale, focused on the deconstruction of national identity. In 2026, you will once again be one of the Maltese artists presenting an exhibition at the Venice Biennale. What theme have you chosen this time? Do you want to address aspects of collective identity again?

My work always addresses political issues, often interspersed with references to other areas and disciplines. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in political hope and the notions of progress and healing that specific institutions seem to carry.  And I can’t help thinking about the political rhetoric, ironic slippages into the same old mistakes and a sense of crisis that seems to pervade our world despite our constant proclamations about social change and justice in different fields, including education. So my creative work inhabits this uncertain place located somewhere between hope and hopelessness. In a way, it’s something like a public admission that I don‘t have any answers, especially longterm answers. The work I am preparing for the Venice Biennale in 2026 engages with the need to take to the streets to make one’s voice heard and the contemporary challenge many people face of understanding whether truth has any real meaning today. Protest exists in this ambiguous space between the streets and our mobile phones: a place where the desire for collective action and the simultaneous desire to create oneself as an entrepreneurial being exist in an ongoing tension. Art addresses this tension, but does it carry more hope than political activism?

In the chapter Past Performance in the edited book Living Histories, you describe national identities as constructions and emphasize their potentially dangerous aspects – defining oneself against an 'enemy' or creating borders. However, you also acknowledge that 'shared histories, languages and social contexts carry deep meanings for people'. I can't help but recall testimonies from representatives of Czech emigration who spoke about how cultural identity helped them survive in exile. Can't categories like nationality or shared culture be a source of strength, not just danger? And if so - how do we cultivate them so they don't slide into what you criticize?

What you say about Czech emigration applies equally to representatives of the Maltese diaspora around the world, especially in the past. Many Maltese people packed their few belongings and left for what they expected to be a better life in Australia, the United States, Canada, the UK and some other places during the second half of the twentieth century. Many of them found solace in shared cultural traditions like food, language, song, and so on, to the extent that their ideas about Malteseness remained frozen in time while people back in Malta were changing. Several years ago, I visited some members of the Maltese community in Toronto and was intrigued by things like food and everyday conversations that reminded me of my childhood. So, yes, I agree that a shared culture can make us feel stronger but sometimes, what we think is shared is actually a mental construction. Now, some mental constructions are totally safe. For example, we sing local lullabies to children to help them fall asleep: the mother’s voice, combined with a shared language and a sense of tradition come together to create a soothing sense of serenity. But mental constructions can also become dangerous when they are based on ignorance. For example, some years ago, there were demonstrations by so-callled patriots in Malta, where free pork sandwiches were handed out. They wanted to protest against Muslims who were praying in public in large groups. So, another group’s shared culture was perceived as a threat, and eating pork was deemed to be an effective way of showing that we are not only different but better than others.

You refer to Zygmunt Bauman and his 'liquid modernity' - that state where our lives, relationships, identities are in constant motion, nothing is permanent. It's a fascinating diagnosis, but perhaps also a frightening one. Don't you sometimes wonder if it's precisely this liquidity – this feeling that we have no solid ground beneath our feet – that drives people back to the worst kind of nationalism? To that need to dig in, build a wall, say 'this is ours'? Isn't there a paradox that the more we talk about fluidity, the more people seek solidity?

Of course there’s a paradox. A few months ago, I asked a waiter in a restaurant in Sliema, Malta, for a rather typical and well-known local beer. The waiter was Indian and clearly had never heard of the beer, so I politely asked for something else. Maybe it’s a small price to pay for this fluid sense of change that is ultimately due to the fact that very few Maltese actually aspire to become waiters in bars and restaurants today. Yet, feeling like a foreigner in your own country is admittedly frustrating and easily makes you dream of a time when you could order that cold beer without finding yourself lost in translation.

My references to our identities in constant motion are associated with Homo Melitensis, the exhibition I co-curated in Venice in 2017, and which we are retelling in a new exhibition set up in October, 2025 at the national museum MUŻA in Valletta. In the exhibition, we could have chosen to oppose this fear of losing the solid ground beneath our feet that you refer to very directly. Instead, we opted for a reductio ad absurdum approach.  In other words, we playfully explored the contradictions of assuming that things would really never change. We constructed a classification system that would provide us with an inventory of all the things we would lose if our identity really vanished one day. We thought that the only way to preserve history and people would be to lock them up in glass cases, like dioramas in a natural history museum. This also meant that the identities of men and women were frozen in time, and that any shifts in gender identity would simply be defined as anomalies. We ironically considered the idea that it was probably a good thing that our island was fortified centuries ago, because bastions keep nice things in and bad things out of the country. Of course, keeping foreign things out of the country would also have meant that potatoes and tomatoes would never have been imported into Malta. And this would have meant that so-called typical Maltese dishes would never have evolved.

If we question traditional concepts like national culture or local traditions – what do we offer people as an alternative? How can art or education help people find orientation and meaning in today's world without returning them to problematic forms of identity?

We need to find ways of being together, despite the obvious difficulties associated with a rapid sense of change. I don‘t aspire to live in a world where I feel more terrified of people who share my own nationality and traditions than of others who don’t. And, while I respect educational thinkers who propose pedagogies of hope and justice, I also recognise the need to accept that we cannot actually hope for a fully transparent relation with everyone. For me, art is a way of engaging with this difficulty. Curatorial work is possibly even more responsive to this difficulty, because it is all about building relationships with ideas that stimulate our imagination precisely because we do not fully understand what they mean.

Your exhibition Places of Attention: Ruins of Reason, Roots of Renewal is currently running in Prague at the Altán Klamovka gallery. This time you address the critique of anthropocentrism and the vision of a 'zoocratic' civilization where not only humans have a voice, but also animals, plants, and the Earth itself. What would this look like in practice? And doesn't this vision – with all due respect to the Gaia hypothesis – lead to even greater disorientation? Or do you see in the ecological crisis a real opportunity to rewrite the social contract?

I am interested in what Michel Serres called a natural contract but I am fully aware that dreaming of a zoocracy does not actually mean that animals or plants will take over the world, or that humanity will become extinct. I don‘t even think that finding a balance with other living things means that we can fully comprehend them in the future. Once again, it is more a question of addressing the things that disorient us rather than finding a peaceful spot in our comfort zone. The large drawings on fabric I am showing at the Altán Klamovka gallery show parliament buildings overgrown with plant life and trees.  We may need to imagine forms of engagement with feral life if we want to reinvent our places of assembly, but we cannot really define such a democracy yet. What we do know is that we are not there yet because we are too obsessed by the commercialisation of information around us. What I mean by the commercialisation of information is that various digital realities we engage with on the social media and on artificial intelligence platforms seem to aspire to a central goal: that of rewarding individuals with what they want, like or need. This algorithmic gratification provides only a semblance of happiness and freedom. It does not guarantee stronger relations with the kinds of things that exist outside our immediate fields of interest.

At the Faculty of Design and Art of Ladislav Sutnar at the University of West Bohemia, you led a workshop Places of Attention for doctoral students of the program Interdisciplinary Research Through Visual Arts. The workshop was organized by Associate Professor Lenka Sýkorová as part of her research activities at the Faculty of Design and Art. Lenka Sýkorová also curated the exhibition Places of Attention. What do you see as the main challenges for young artists and researchers who seek to connect art with social engagement? And what personally enriches you most in collaborating with students and academic environments abroad?

I cannot generalise about art and social engagement because it can take many forms: from participatory art to political activism and other kinds of work. What I think is important about interdisciplinary research is its angegement with fields that make one question the very basis of art itself. Too often, people or students in the art world form social circles with others who are very similar to themselves. Of course, this can be important because one finds strength in commonalities. And art-making can be a very solitary activity, much more than theatrical practice for example. But it’s also important to expose oneself to very different perspectives of the things we like and the ideas we address in our work. This is why I sometimes get my students at the University of Malta to work with academics and students in other fields like archaeology, history, genetics, environmental science and so on. At times, one needs to come face to face with the unknown in order to be in a better position to evaluate one’s own work and ideas.