Therese Debono

BLANK was exhibited at Palazzo Cosentini during the 14th edition of Ragusa Foto Festival, held in Ragusa Ibla, Sicily, under the artistic direction of Alessandra Mauro. Responding to the festival’s 2026 theme, Archetipi Mediterranei (Mediterranean Archetypes), the project formed part of Dall’altra parte del Mediterraneo (On the Other Side of the Mediterranean), a curated section bringing together perspectives from across the region. BLANK was presented alongside projects by Moroccan-Belgian artist Mous Lamrabat, Tunisian Magnum photographer Zied Ben Romdhane and Greek artist and filmmaker Evangelia Kranioti.

Developed in response to Malta’s rapidly transforming built environment, BLANK examines the exposed white party walls left behind as older structures are demolished and replaced. Intended eventually to disappear behind adjacent construction, these surfaces remain visible as temporary yet increasingly persistent features of the island’s landscape. They register both absence and anticipation: traces of the buildings, views, histories and forms of inhabitation that have been erased, as well as indications of what may eventually occupy the space around them.

For Ragusa Foto Festival, BLANK was presented through four works operating across three visual registers: aerial, frontal and forensic. The aerial register, exhibited in this form for the first time, situates the walls within the broader Maltese landscape, revealing them not as isolated architectural anomalies but as a repeated, countable and mappable condition. The frontal register confronts the viewer with the monumental white wall that has become the project’s central visual form. The forensic register, also shown publicly for the first time, moves into closer proximity, where apparent blankness gives way to marks, textures, fractures, traces, signs and symbols embedded within the wall’s surface.

Moving between overview, confrontation and close examination, the installation invited viewers to consider how meaning changes according to the distance from which a landscape is encountered and read. In doing so, BLANK explores how places bear witness to memory and erasure, and how apparently neutral surfaces can hold evidence of social, emotional and spatial transformation.

During the festival’s opening programme, Debono was interviewed about the development of BLANK and its relationship to Malta’s changing urban landscape. She also took part in the public conversation Dall’altra parte del Mediterraneo, led by Alessandra Mauro with Sam Stourdzé, Director of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, and Mous Lamrabat. The discussion considered new geographies of global photography and the ways artists situated around the Mediterranean are using the photographic image to examine place, identity, memory and transformation.