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Valletta Contemporary Interviews: Opus They
Decentering the Human: Inside Opus They
In this interview about Opus They, the transdisciplinary project presented at Valletta Contemporary in December 2025, core creative members Raphael Vella and Michael Quinton explain how the year-and-a-half research and one-night exhibition sought to challenge human-centred thinking and explore new modes of collective, interdisciplinary engagement with ecological, geopolitical and technological crises. The team — including an architect, sound designer, artist, and cultural project manager — engaged broader stakeholders in dialogues and focus groups to blur disciplinary boundaries and cultivate ethical cooperation. Central to their discussion is the idea of “decentring human subjectivity,” which, they argue, requires overcoming egocentric habits of thought to recognise humans’ symbiotic relationship with the non-human world. Through creative prototypes, collective games and a focus on democratic dialogue grounded in deep listening and openness, Opus They aimed to reimagine how knowledge and agency might be shared and embodied beyond the exhibition space, with an eye toward applicability in educational, civic, and creative contexts.
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‘Opus they’: a transdisciplinary pop-up exhibition and public discussion
Exploring the intersection of art, identity, and collaboration in Malta’s latest transdisciplinary showcase
opus they positions itself at the intersection of artistic research and critical theory, engaging deeply with questions of planetary precarity, material entanglement, and the futures of design, sound, and visual culture. The platform considers how creative practice can contribute meaningfully to democratic dialogue and transformative action at a time of accelerated change.
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The arts in a time of crisis
Can the arts contribute to making sense of the various global challenges we face today?
Caroline Gatt, anthropologist and Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Karl-Franzens-University of Graz
“The current crises are not disconnected. There are environmental catastrophes together with human ones caused by political situations, and they are all linked. For example, the fires in California and Canada, or the floods we had here in Austria, where people ended up homeless. There’s the genocide that is happening in Palestine, and the erosion of democracy in the US under Trump.
We can approach these challenges from the perspective of the South American political and scholarly movement called the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) project. Researchers in this project look at the colonialism of the Spanish and the Portuguese in South America. The urge for expansion was a search for riches because Europe at the time was so poor. Colonists brought ideas, people, plant materials, other riches to Europe, and the MCD scholars argue that it was this influx that enabled modernity to develop at all. But then Euro-centric histories discuss modernity as emerging only from European creativity. It’s basically an extraction of knowledge, materials, people, wealth, which enabled Europe to become as powerful and rich as it did. And so when you think about the catastrophes that we have today, most of them arise due to that same form of extractivism, where all the wealth gets sucked into Europe and North America, thereby impoverishing the other parts of the world.”
Language, deep listening and the need for a new mythos
Meaning and understanding needs to move away from the limits of binary thinking
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Michael Quinton, sound designer and researcher
A new mythos would need to be realised, where integrative intimacy is required for the human being to experience the outer world within oneself, and for the outer world to experience the inner domain of the human being like a ‘looking glass’ that harmoniously reflects both sides into each other.
Meaning and understanding needs to move away from the limits of binary thinking and become more integral to be able to navigate through the multifaceted nature of life. This is achieved not just through the accumulation of data, but the deeper and more intimate realisation of things.
Through this level of depth and inquiry into the nature of a creature or object, a language of presence is needed which emanates from a deeper level of understanding and intimacy, which conveys an ecological relationship where, if one was to utter the true name of a river then one would have to relate to it as kin and not as a resource.