Malta Biennale. Vessels of silens. The Journey and Memory of the Mediterranean

¡Concha García . Pabillon Spain 2025

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Throughout history, the Mediterranean has been the stage for intense cultural, political, and commercial exchanges. Its shores have hosted a crucible of civilizations whose legacies remain deeply inscribed in the history of humanity.

The works on display reflect these flows of goods, ideas, and knowledge, building a bridge between artisanal tradition and contemporary sensibility. They serve as a point of departure for metaphorically navigating the waters of the Mediterranean, evoking the connections that have bound its peoples across time.

Vessels of Silence emerged following the discovery of plaster molds preserved for decades in a Spanish pottery workshop (Portillo, Valladolid), active across five generations. These molds, originally used in the 1960s, reappear today as documents of collective memory, bearing history, technique, and traces of everyday life. The resulting works—a series of clay vessels with reliefs drawn from these molds and interpreted through the influence of Romanesque-Christian imagery—reactivate this heritage.

The project bears witness to continuity within the Mediterranean ceramic tradition, where manual labor, passed down from generation to generation, is symbolically reflected in the visual piece Making, which proposes an act of recovery and preservation of our history. The vessel, an archetypal form of the Mediterranean basin, thus becomes a container of memory.

A canoe woven with gold threads, supported by three silver bars gilded in gold and engraved with a poetic text, functions as a symbol of a journey that traverses history. Its lightness simultaneously evokes the fragility and the persistence of human trajectories.

Finally, an inventory of everyday objects—items drawn from domestic environments—establishes a link to the present. These objects, products of our civilization and tangible traces of our existence, are presented as witnesses to contemporary collective memory.

Memory thus reveals itself as an invisible thread that preserves our time and extends a bridge toward future generations