Mercury Rising: Artwashing through real estate | Gabriel Zammit

Mercury Towers, commissioned and built by Joseph Portelli and designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, epitomises contradiction.

In the first part of this limited series, I argued that the towers are a consequence of a postcolonial, neoliberal world view that is reducing Malta – physically and psychologically – to a landscape of problematic real estate development that strives to maximise social and financial capital.

As a consequence, developers operate through a contradictory technique that supersedes need, policy, context and common sense, but has also become the norm.

Another set of contradictions emerges from Portelli’s attempts to launder his reputation via Mercury-adjacent cultural projects.

Earlier this year, an exhibition titled Mercury Rising opened at Valletta Contemporary gallery (VC), showing photos of Mercury Towers taken by Julian Vassallo, as well as material from the project, such as architectural drawings, proposals and a 3D-model of the complex.

Vassallo is an architect in his own right and is a well-respected artist with several high-quality photography projects under his belt. VC is also Malta’s best independent gallery and has thus far been a bastion of uncompromised good taste. It puts up some of Malta’s best critical shows. The exhibition before Mercury Rising was titled Comino Will be Different Next Year, a critical shot at the degradation and political inaction around Comino.

In Mercury Rising, Vassallo’s images are beautiful and well made, but their beauty, just like the tower itself, masks a hidden underbelly. Their dead architectural abstraction betrays a dead interior, and beauty is all they can manage, because any other claim they make lands as disingenuous.

It is because of Vassallo’s status as an artist who has sensitively documented our island’s changing natural and urban landscape, looking for an “alternate perception of Malta’s current natural and built environment”, that Mercury Rising is doubly heart-breaking. Within the context of an exhibition text that sounds like it was copy-written by Mercury’s PR office, the exhibition is irredeemably mediocre.

This is another contradiction, and even though the exhibition was actually organised in part by Zaha Hadid Architects, Mercury Rising is financed by Portelli and allows him to make headway into normalising a relationship with a contemporary art world that, collectively likes to think of itself as radical, free-spirited and able to speak truth to power.

One wonders whether Zaha Hadid Architects understand the complicated reception that their project has elicited from the Maltese population, and if so whether they realise the implications of Mercury Rising.

Aside from this exhibition, Portelli has also commissioned the artist and influencer Zack Richie to produce a series of larger-than-life bronze sculptures, to decorate Mercury Square. Additionally, ME by Meliá, a five-star exclusive art-hotel franchise, will soon be opening in Mercury.

In a conversation with Portelli himself, he mentioned that ME will be curated by Hannah Dowling and Luke Azzopardi, who are working with a team of Maltese artists to decorate the hotel.

There are many counter-arguments to be made about canny cultural practitioners syphoning funds away from greedy developers and putting them to good use; or the age old ‘if it isn’t me someone else is going to do it, so might as well make sure it’s done right,’; or even the fact that creative practitioners need to make a living and private money is difficult to come by. But whatever the outcome of these projects, Azzopardi, Dowling and Richie will be contributing to Portelli’s reputation laundering.

The three artists have all developed projects in the past that engage with Malta’s changing identity, some more outspoken than others, but all looking to develop new perspectives on who we are as a people, our heritage and, overtly or tacitly, how to stem the tide of cynicism and cultural retrograde.

All this makes their choice to work with Mercury doubly problematic, because it throws shade on what they have done before, allowing Portelli to weaponise their names in service of his reputation laundering.

Speaking about his bronzes, Richie tells us that he has developed “five sculptures, each one portraying different aspects of Malta; cultural artefacts, such as our landscape, the lady of fertility, the luzzu [...] the brave knight, and we also have this new character called Mercury, who basically brings them all together and revives them for the future.”

Zack Richie’s bronze sculptures

This is a throwaway comment, but within it there is something darkly indicative.

Within Richie’s world, it is Mercury that breathes significance into elements of our traditional culture, not vice versa. Richie’s sculptures are an allegory for Mercury claiming the power to write culture, and therefore to also influence identity. I am not filled with nostalgia about a sun-soaked Maltese idyll, and I also feel that us millennials (and later generations) should productively renegotiate, rejuvenate and refresh a cultural past that has stagnated and become caricatured to cater for the tourist gaze.

One way of effecting change is through ambitious architectural projects, but when it comes to Mercury Towers it would be worth significantly less (materially and aesthetically) if it were not for the cultural and geographical heritage that we’ve inherited and that encompasses it, not vice versa.

Placed in sequence, Richie’s characters also indicate the offerings that successive generations and settlers have left to Malta – the sleeping goddess from a mythological prehistory; the knight from an age of adventure; the luzzu from our seafaring past and encompassing them all the Maltese landscape. And now, Richie slips Mercury into this list; a snake egg in a bird’s nest, and a totem to the concrete flats and rampant urban excess crawling across Malta like a cancer.

Within Greek mythology, Mercury is the god of communication, but also the god of thievery, trickery and financial gain, and the real twist in this situation is that Richie’s Mercury stands for everything that is eroding, destroying and uglifying our islands.

Reputation laundering via cultural projects is not a new move for Portelli. He has had himself painted into a festa banner as St John the Evangelist in Nadur and bought the Ħamrun Spartans football club.

But while football and festi have always been muti-faceted, problematic beasts, with connections to dodgy financiers, VC embodies a vision that takes its cue from a contemporary art world that is largely critical of corrupt politics and compromised decision making.

Seeing the Mercury project take over the gallery feels like one of the last bastions of uncompromised critique has been breached. Portelli is not only trying to clean up his reputation, but also to write himself into Maltese history as a cultural icon.

With enough money, the photos from the exhibition night – both Julian’s and the ones taken of the reception – seem to say that everything and anyone can be bought.