Cause and Effect, VIVA Festival, Malta

Raphael Vella, senior lecturer at the University of Malta where he teaches Art Education and Critical Theory, had taken the initiative to organise a festival of the arts. This combined a great number of art exhibitions, solo art events, film screenings, and a curatorial school, a one-week Summer School for young and aspiring curators. We were both invited to participate with lectures, seminars, and… our exhibition.

The festival he initiated and organised is called VIVA - meaning Valletta International Visual Arts, but also connoting the vitality of this art world. In 2018, Valletta with jointly with Leeuwarden (the Netherlands) be Cultural Capital of Europe.

Our exhibition fitted very well with the endeavour to keep artistic, intellectual and political issues together - to refuse the divide between those domains. The de-narrativised, de-individualised version of the Madame B material we had presented in Tallinn in January was reordered a bit. We decided to call it Cause & Effect. This is a reference to the t.v. programme in which Charles fails to stand up to Emma’s ambition for him. But more importantly, it questions the logic of the financial crisis. By attempting to point the finger at culprits - in this case, of course, the banks - we fail to see the complexity of causality as such. The reversal of the relationship between Cause (as coming first) and Effect (as its passive, slavish consequence) we tend to obliterate the complicity of everyone in the system we only abhor once we see its effect - the crisis. But we were there when it happened - the cause - and cheerfully helped the banks by taking over-the-top loans, and taking advantage of the offered lures.