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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 21 JUNE 2020 4 THIS WEEK ART Glen Calleja – poet, book-binder and Artistic Director of the 'Five Five' online art exhibition – speaks to TEODOR RELJIC about this latest project, a collaboration with the duo behind Solid Eye, which invites viewers to experience a speculative future Malta Striving for the fantastical but skipping Apart from your interdiscipli- nary mix of artistic inclinations, you also run Studio Solipsis: could you give us a snapshot of what that implies and entails, and how it has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic? How do you hope to get a more healthy rhythm going as we get back to relative normality? For the past three years, Studio Solipsis has served as a meeting place for various organisations and is also home to Kotba Calleja, the bindery that I run, and to Gi- ola Cassar's photographic studio. We have held exhibitions, talks, readings, workshops and all sorts of informal meetings. So the stu- dio's identity has always been as a place of encounter and exchange between various art and cultural practices. When the pandemic broke out, we were just finishing some refur- bishment works. So now we have three new rooms but haven't had the opportunity to welcome an- yone in them yet. We will prob- ably be back with some events towards the end of the summer when things have calmed down a little. What does being an Artistic Director for a project like Five Five entail? Which of your skills and experiences are coming in particularly handy as you undertake this task? My professional practices are very eclectic. The collaborative work I typically get involved in generally involves text, books and some audiovisual and performa- tive elements. The common de- nominator between all of those is the orchestration of imagery. That, to me, translates into a con- scious attempt at adding value for the viewer or the reader or who- ever comes in contact with our work. So artistic direction to me is mostly about adding value. The approach I prefer is to look for direction as the work devel- ops. What I ask from the team members is not to aim for a spe- cific final product, but to follow some simple principles and then I regularly check in with them. So my role in Five Five mostly revolved around minor interven- tions on issues of composition, referencing and visual and textu- al narrative. My work with Rod- erick and Josmar, the designers from Solid Eye, was mostly based on simple technical and narra- tional challenges such as what happens to the whole picture if the raven looks more to the view- er? Or, can we shift the compo- sitional elements of a picture to enhance contrasts, rhythm and introduce a clearer narrational hierarchy between elements in the picture? Artistic Direction is playful and exploratory, collaborative, dia- logic. Five Five is not the first 'futur- ology' project that you have undertaken. Could you tell us a little bit about your previous plunge into similar waters – the Archived Futures Harvest – and how it now informs what you're doing with Five Five? Yes, that's correct to a large de- gree. Every project has its own challenges of course and there's no one methodology that is uni- versally applicable to all projects that fall into the 'futurology' cat- egory. Archived Futures Harvest was a project we participated in as a studio. I personally learnt a lot from the methodologies used in that project. Eventually I led the Subjective Maps (2016-2018) project where I developed a four step methodology on which to build different types of maps that layer past, present and future in one map; the what-once-was, the what-is and the what-could- be. The three layers follow each chronologically. Similarly, in Five Five we con- structed our visuals and texts following extensive research. Thanks to the professional staff of the National Archives of Malta we managed to find some really interesting stories and historic photographs on which we then built our narratives. Our work, both visual and textual, always aspires towards the magical but is rarely wildly fantastical. There are exceptions, of course, but in general we did not venture too far out into the territory of fantasy. What was it like to collaborate with Solid Eye on this project, and how do your respective dis- ciplines and approaches mesh together? We were constantly feeding each other ideas. In fact, every step of the Five Five project was collaborative. The starting point was on site. That's where our dis- cussions and ideas started. The guys from Solid Eye are ex- perts at visualising narratives and creating environments. That's similar to what we do in poetry "Our work, both visual and textual, always aspires towards the magical but is rarely wildly fantastical" Glen Calleja