Professor Raphael Vella from the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education within the Faculty of Education was invited by the curators of the Mahalla Festival in Turkey to participate in this year's edition, called 'Murmuration'.
Professor Vella travelled to Istanbul to set up a video installation that combined a new animation called Antibody (2021) with another socially engaged art project he has been working on during 2021, Suitable Citizens.
Both projects deal with the overarching theme of migration. The animation uses hundreds of drawings to tell a tale mixing historical and contemporary narratives, medicine and politics.
On the other hand, Suitable Citizens is the product of months of EU-funded research with a group of participants from different African countries (Habtom Tsigehans, Tesfay Simon, Helen Adhanom, Edith Flore, Precious Orogun and Daniel Okoegwale) who participated in a workshop with Professor Vella and three other artist-teachers: Giola Cassar, Sarah Maria Scicluna and Luke Azzopardi.
This project has received funding from the European Union鈥檚 Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870621.
More information about this work and other international artists in the festival can be found .
