On Saturday, MALTA-ARCH produced an Activist Performance entitled ‘Protect this Land’ at the Santa Verna Temple in Xaghra, Gozo, featuring Marlene Saliba, Yoshida Shuntaro, Izabela Klara Biskupska, Ingrid Jahn, and Dawn A. Saliba.

The performance was a highly interactive mythic combination of poetry, dance and song. Its purpose was to draw attention to the archaeological and ecological destruction threatening the area around the Santa Verna Temple on the Ghajn Lukin plateau, including the Ta’ Lablab caves.

Marlene Saliba´s poetry, read in both Maltese and English from her collection, Xbihat tal-Antenati / Ancestral Visions, summed up the theme of the performance.

In between Marlene Saliba’s poetry, dynamic choreography was staged by Shuntaro Yoshida, a postdoctoral fellow and dance scholar from Japan, whose work is deeply inspired by the ecology of the area.Izabela Klara Biskupska also performed her own poetry as well as interacted with the audience as one of the ‘Fates’, alongside Ingrid Jahn, performing forms of “oracular divination” utilising bones, shells, rocks, runestones, and inscribed messages.

Dawn A. Saliba also performed her poetry and music. The performers expressed varying emotions regarding the destruction of Gozo’s natural landscape: despair, anger, but also hope and transcendence, as Marlene Saliba’s poetry also encapsulated

The performance ended with a dance that the audience participated in and was followed by a “prehistoric” feast, featuring a stew made up of ingredients similar to the crops grown on the land thousands of years ago: barley, lentils, and peas drizzled with honey and sea salt.

MALTA-ARCH urged the public to please take further action to protect the landscape surrounding the temple by signing an international #SaveSantaVerna petition and emailing Prime Minister robert.abela@gov.mt Minister for the National Heritage, the Arts and Local Government of Malta, owen.bonnici@gov.mt and Superintendent of Cultural Heritage, kurt.e.farrugia@gov.mt

MALTA-ARCH is a collective that helps to advocate for Malta’s natural, cultural, and archaeological heritage.

Photos: MALTA-ARCH

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