Blank currently exhibited for the Malta Biennale 2026 at the Ggantija Temples in Gozo, examines the exposed party walls that emerge across Malta when houses are demolished and replaced by new apartment blocks. These white surfaces, usually temporary yet visually striking, reveal the hidden outlines of former homes and the lives once contained within them.
Photographed with restraint and distance, the walls appear almost neutral. Yet they function as architectural indexes of absence. Their smooth surfaces carry the shadows of staircases, rooflines, and internal rooms that no longer exist, transforming ordinary urban spaces into quiet traces of erasure.
These walls are not simply by-products of construction. They mark moments of rupture within the urban fabric. As homes disappear and new developments rise beside them, the exposed surfaces become visible records of a form of spatial violence embedded within rapid urban transformation.
Rather than documenting demolition directly, Blank focuses on what remains after the act. The project observes how the built environment absorbs change, allowing these surfaces to stand as indexes of transition, memory, and loss within Malta’s evolving landscape.
n Place. Where the Land Holds (Malta Biennale 2026, MUŻA, Valletta) is a photographic investigation into how landscapes retain traces of violence long after the events themselves have disappeared from view. The project documents sites across Malta where femicides have occurred, returning to these locations years later to examine how the ordinary fabric of the built environment continues to exist alongside the memory of rupture.
The research combines visual investigation with archival inquiry, drawing on newspaper archives, court documentation, journalistic reports, and conversations with neighbours, journalists, photojournalists, and, where possible, families connected to the cases. These sources helped establish the precise locations where the events occurred, situating each photograph within its spatial context.
At first glance, the places appear unremarkable: residential streets, buildings, doorways, fragments of the everyday landscape. Nothing visibly indicates the events that once took place there. Life has continued, architecture remains, and the spaces have been reabsorbed into the rhythms of daily life. Yet knowledge transforms perception. The landscape becomes charged through absence.
The methodology of In Place is grounded in restraint and observational distance. Rather than reconstructing violence or employing symbolic gestures, the work focuses on the actual locations where these acts occurred. Ethical considerations dictated the framing of the images: the camera returns to the site without intervention, staging, or dramatization, allowing the place itself to remain central while avoiding spectacle or narrative illustration.
Within this framework, the landscape operates as an index: a trace indicating that something has taken place. Photography introduces a second index, registering the present condition of the site while pointing to the event that once unfolded there.
Through this approach, In Place considers how environments absorb human events and how time transforms spaces marked by trauma, allowing presence, absence, and memory to coexist within the everyday landscape.
Assumed Safety explores environments that appear benign yet carry latent conditions of vulnerability. Moving across urban, industrial, and natural landscapes, the work focuses on spaces where visibility is fragmented, movement is uncertain, and spatial control is ambiguous. Rather than depicting events, the images examine how unease can be embedded within the structure of a place itself. The project forms part of an ongoing practice-based research into how landscapes reveal, conceal, or anticipate human experience.
Subtraction examines architecture through acts of removal, where absence operates as a spatial index of what has been extracted. The work focuses on sites where buildings have been partially or fully removed, exposing interiors and reconfiguring the relationship between façade, depth, and ground.
Rather than depicting demolition as spectacle, the images adopt a frontal and measured approach, allowing the void to emerge as a material and volumetric presence. What remains is not emptiness, but a reorganisation of space in which interiors become exterior, and boundaries are redefined through loss.
The project considers how urban environments are continuously edited through processes of extraction, leaving behind spaces that are neither complete nor resolved. These sites function as quiet evidence of transformation, where absence becomes legible and architectural continuity is interrupted.
Subtraction is an ongoing body of work.
