Valletta Contemporary
Interviews: Opus They
Interviewed by Ann Dingli
December 2025
Opus They at Valletta Contemporary was a transdisciplinary pop-up exhibition and public discussion held in early December 2025. It brought together artists, an architect and a sound designer — including Raphael Vella, Chris Briffa and Michael Quinton — to explore interconnected global crises through a post-anthropocentric creative lens. The project challenged human-centred thinking by merging art, architecture and sound to reimagine relations between humans, the nonhuman world and systems of knowledge. Through research-based creative work, opus they encouraged interdisciplinary cooperation and ethical, collective modes of thinking in response to ecological, geopolitical and technological upheavals. Vella and Quinton here talk to Ann Dingli about the wider application of the project.
Ann Dingli (AD): Your showcase took place on one night. Can you describe what came before that? What was the process that led to Opus They?
Raphael Vella (RV): Opus They is a research project that lasted around one and a half years. It has four members in its core team: artist and curator Raphael Vella, architect Chris Briffa, sound designer and musical composer Michael Quinton and cultural project manager Marcon Borg Caruana. Basically, we decided to explore creative processes that promote cooperation while critiquing dualistic distinctions between human beings and the external world. In order to do this, we decided that it would not be enough for us to keep the research to ourselves, so we engaged other artists and stakeholders in discussions and focus groups. This emphasis on interdisciplinary thinking offered us the possibility of studying real-world challenges from different perspectives and modifying our own ideas on the basis of these other perspectives.
AD: You talk about a mission to "decenter human subjectivity and reconfigure traditional understandings of matter and agency'. Can you explain this? How can you decenter human subjectivity while being human?
Michael Quintion (MQ): Human modes of thinking have become more ‘egocentric’ emphasising and accentuating the importance of the self. This has influenced human thinking and perception and has detached the human being from the rest of nature. Modern day insight regarding consciousness suggests that the human being is the only conscious agent in the known universe which automatically means that all other agencies are unconscious. And this belief has led to abusive treatment of other human and non-human agencies, including planet Earth.
This mentality is affecting numerous ecosystems, air pollution, noise pollution, the destruction of forests which are vital to survival and have upset weather patterns. The attempts to mitigate this damage are hindered or stopped when these actions are non-profitable or detrimentally affect income.
To decentre the human being an educational shift needs to happen where people become aware of their actual symbiotic relationship to nature. A very simple example lies in breathing. Humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out Carbon Dioxide. Plants, breathe in Carbon Dioxide and breathe out oxygen. There is a total relationship between two different species, simple, yet one cannot live without the other.
To connect to the outside world the individual person has to move beyond self-centred thought and to become receptive to any externality, allowing it to communicate within oneself. To achieve this there needs to be a certain quiet or a shift in attention from oneself and giving total attention to the externality that is being observed.
It is a form of deep listening, of self-sacrifice, where the individual receptively opens up to exterior phenomena, and in doing so filters out all the labels, words, images, and beliefs that arise in the mind when perceiving.
The brain is the worst tool for understanding the outside world because it is only capable of measuring everything in comparison. Friend or foe, good or bad, light and dark and this information is diluted, removing the complexity of the creature or object being observed. That is why a shift is necessary where the individual perceiving or interacting with another non-human creature needs to overcome the incessant chatter of the mind.
Once this occurs the person opens themselves up to truly feel or experience the externality in its entirety. And in doing so a much deeper connection is likely to arise between the perceiver and the perceived, where the perceived comes alive for the perceiver and is no longer seen as being inanimate or separate.
AD: Can you describe some of the prototypes that came about from the project? What did they manifest as and what did they represent?
RV: Opus They engaged other stakeholders to access observations related to different fields of expertise, theoretical perspectives and critical evaluations. All the data collected during the interviews and focus groups were analysed to reveal patterns, relationships and emergent themes or codes. One of the central tasks in Opus They was the development of a model for collective labour that would blur disciplinary boundaries and encourage hybrid propositions. The development of such a model was based on the research codes that had emerged from the data. We developed a scalable model which functions like a creative game that would allow each participant to choose a research code and an extract related to that code and give it to another participant as a creative challenge. This game led to the production of the final pieces for the event at Valletta Contemporary.
AD: 'Democratic dialogue' is cited as something the Opus They project strived for. In today's world the paradox of dialogue is that it exists in unedited surplus – through freedom of commentary online – yet also in an unfiltered abyss. How does dialogue become democratic – how does it escape both its constancy and inevitable oblivion?
MQ: Problems encountered in dialogue are due to preconceived beliefs that need to be defended against an opposing view. There is a lacking ability in human understanding to accept multipolar views and an insistence to force one’s view, often perceived as being the right one, over the others which are perceived as being wrong or mistaken.
In the Opus They project we had to be careful not to fall into the trap of promoting the non-anthropomorphic as being a solution for the anthropomorphic world view. One of the main conclusions that arose from the project was that either a synthesis of the two views or a complete acceptance of the differences in these polar opposites would have to be allowed to co-exist. And this would mean that the multicomplex levels of these opposing worldviews would have to be taken into consideration and viewed for what they truly are.
Dialogue is likely to be more democratic when it is not contaminated with preconceived ideas, beliefs or systems. To truly understand an opposing view, one first has to start by listening to it with the intention of learning.
We can still oppose the idea, but this can be done more intelligently if there is a deeper understanding of it in the first place. Instead of labelling the opposing view as being ‘bad’ we take it for what it is, and to be able to do this we have to have a good grasp of it first. This is why openness is essential to democratic dialogue.
This suggests that a level of humility and self-sacrifice is needed to be able to interact on this level. Listening and feeling is essential to be able to gauge the other person and to understand where they are coming from. One must always be ready to revise their own world views and to learn from the opposite side. There needs to be a will to do so and an understanding of the limited world view that we ourselves harbour.
Human insights and understanding of the world are crude and bounded, no matter how smart one is, there are huge limitations and holes in our thinking and understanding. This should be the foundation upon which we approach dialogue, knowing our restrictions and ready to learn from the other person’s or people’s world view.
Socrates used to ask questions and look for answers instead of putting forward points of view. His method was based upon cooperative argumentative dialogue which would stimulate critical thinking and illuminate ideas. The basis of this was that of ‘knowing nothing’.
One has to keep in mind that our perception of the world is limited to the language that we speak, the environment which we grew up in, our education, our government and political system, our clerics and religious systems, our financial and economic situation and overall well-being.
Instead of enforcing how much we know, we start off from the premise of how much we don’t know and in doing so we become more pliable and flexible, we gain insight and are able to think more freely.
AD: Opus They seems to have been an intellectual inquiry, with physical experiments resulting, and a collection of research supporting ideas. How can it now manifest in the real world? Do you have plans to make this bigger and more graspable or applicable?
RV: Opus They began as an intellectual inquiry, but its ambition has always been to operate beyond the exhibition space. The experiments and research are propositions that test how non-binary, post-anthropocentric thinking can be embodied, sensed, and negotiated. I don’t think we need to think solely about final works like pieces of art. Ideally, this kind of research would retain a sense of experimentation, wherever it occurs: creative sites, educational contexts, civic institutions, and other settings where questions of agency and co-existence are under-articulated. For me, Opus They is about discovering a way of working together in a way that allows the ideas to become graspable through experience rather than explanation.