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Valletta Contemporary

Interview: PAUL SCERRI&GABRIEL ZAMMIT 

Interviewed by Ann Dingli 
January 2025

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Paul Scerri, a ceramic artist with a career spanning over 40 years, began his artistic journey in the 1970s under Esprit Barthet and furthered his studies in Italy at the Accademia Belle Arti Pietro Vanucci and the Istituto Statale D’Arte G. Ballardini. He has exhibited across Europe, with The Sound of You Dreaming marking his first solo show in a decade. Gabriel Zammit, curator for Scerri’s solo at Valletta Contemporary (VC) is a curator, writer, and creative producer whose work explores the merging of craft and concept and is fascinated with fringe experiences that uncover and challenge the foundations of our humanity. His background in philosophy and literature informs his curatorial projects, which he has developed since 2018. Associate curator Andrew Borg Wirth is a curator and architect known for interdisciplinary projects that explore political themes through collaborations with artists, collectives, and organizations. He curates exhibitions and site-specific projects in Malta and internationally. Paul and Gabriel speak to Ann Dingli about Paul’s installation at VC, ‘Matthew's Dream (The Cloud of Unknowing)’, which is a preamble to The Sound of You Dreaming     

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Ann Dingli (AD): I want to know how come the specific attention to 'sound'. Dreams are so often associated with the visual – the acrobatic swirling of the subconscious and how its shapes and forms somehow impact the conscious on waking, before very rapidly disappearing. Thinking of dreams as an aural phenomenon is a curious angle. Thinking about my own, I really believe I dream on mute. Can you talk about this?

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Paul Scerri (PS): As part of my research I interviewed a visually impaired person, asking her about her dreams, and she described them as aurally oriented, presumably because of her lack of sight. The subjectivity of dreams fascinates me: how they vary between one person and another, depending on who they are in the waking world. But there is also a universality that cuts across this too, and dreams contain embodied subjective truths as well as universal realities.

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Gabriel Zammit (GZ): The sound of another’s dreams is a paradoxical notion, it isn’t something that can be heard, and perhaps does not even exist, but what interests me is the notion that listening to someone else's dreaming implies an impossible wish – to cross the dark gulf between one person and another in order to know them, and in turn be known yourself. 
Paul’s work has always dealt with these ideas – the subtle contradictions that govern the unfolding of our lives. And so the metaphor of the sound of another person dreaming functions as an anchor that creates a bridge into Paul’s work and artistic language.

 

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Portrait of Paul Scerri

 

AD: I'm interested in the relationship between the incorporeal dream world and the very corporeal world of ceramics. Can you discuss your translation between the two?

 

PS: I don’t see a huge connection between dreams and ceramics specifically. I think of my medium as a tool to express and translate my thoughts, I use clay and glazes because that’s what I’m comfortable with, and because I know that medium more than anything else. For this exhibition I am also experimenting with installation. I have collected fragments from my own past and I am incorporating them in the exhibition space itself – these are as various as bits of text from old journals, but also furniture and objects from my family's old home, now abandoned. I think the connection between my interior thoughts and what I do is subtle, and perhaps also unclear to me, but I don’t think I want to understand it too deeply, it’s all intuitive and non-rational, I’m interested in making the work, then it’s up to the curators to interpret and unpack what it does.


GZ: Paul’s sculptures are evocative and alchemical, they find parallels with the technique of dreaming, both in terms of form and content. Dreams are a grey zone where things that might not necessarily be associated with one another can be put together. I think Paul does this in his work, and that is the nature of artistic practice in general. There is also a fragility about the dream state that parallels the fragility of ceramics, and the fragility of the creative moment, positioned between rationality and irrationality. Furthermore dreams are a space where things are transformed, for better and for worse, both desires and nightmares can be released. This brings to mind alchemical processes, seeking to transform one thing into another, lead into gold, and Paul transforming earth into fire-hardened clay in his kiln, and creating an imaginative space where it becomes possible to circumscribe things that are known but are inexpressible.

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Portrait of Gabriel Zammit

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AD: The words "deeply human" are used to describe the dream state in the show's description. What does that mean? And do you feel humanity is more communal as an experience in the subconscious world as opposed to the conscious? It's an interesting idea to think that dreams unite human beings more than lucid thoughts do. Because mental systems across humanity differ so wildly, it's difficult to ascribe one definition to what is "deeply human". Do you posit that that universality might exist in dreams? 

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PS: My interest in dreams is mainly because of their visual language, and surrealism. The experience of a dream is solely one’s own. Unless you share your dream, you are trapped within it and no-one shares that exact same memory, but there is also something transgenerational about dreams as well, something universal. It is well known, since Freud, Jung, and even before the birth of psychology, that dreams can follow archetypal patterns, and it is strange how solipsistic experiences can function to connect people, across space and time. I do believe that our basic human operating systems of fear, desire etc. are shared, despite the immense amount of subjectivity across humanity at large. 

 

I had a complex dream when I was around five that I still remember. It was a nightmare, and I think it revealed something to me. I am still haunted by it, and I think it has something to do with my family history, which I don’t entirely understand. This project delves into that. It is my own, but there is also something deeper, that connects to a family past, and wider still, to a collective past, to something that I think is deeply human. 

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Installation photo of the Cloud of Unknowing

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AD: Can you describe some of the major works in the show and whether they directly relate to a specific dream – of your own, someone else's, of peoples collectively?

 

PS: Most of my work holds symbols drawn from my own dreams, and some other works contain fragments from other people’s dreams. The sculptures are mainly figurative, but there are also some semi-abstract works, such as the installation set up at Valletta Contemporary, or the installation works that will be set-up in the main exhibition at Spazju Kreattiv.

 

GZ: Paul’s work is full of hidden things. Bits of text from old journals decorate the surface of his figures, invoking world submerged in time, accessible only as hazy memories and dreams. Half opened drawers in the plinths of the works themselves give glimpses of objects hiding inside, alluding to a subterranean reality located beneath the visible, and Paul creates an iconographic language that is both deeply personal, but also universally relatable.

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Installation photo of the Cloud of Unknowing

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AD: People across time have been obsessed with interpreting dreams – working to find the utility of their symbolism to help weed through life in the waking world. Is the show touching on the notion of interpretation at all? Or does it confine itself to its nebulous realm – how that realm looks, feels, and apparently sounds?

 

PS: To be honest the interpretation of dreams is irrelevant to me. My work is narrative based, and surreal. It is about a process of looking, inwards and outwards, unearthing things through my process and offering that to people through this exhibition, in the hope that they will find something of value there. Perhaps something relatable that speaks about who we are, both when we are alone, but also when we are together, in dreams and in the waking world.

VALLETTA CONTEMPORARY

15, 16, 17, Triq Lvant (East Street), Valletta, VLT1253, Malta

info@vallettacontemporary.com

General enquiries: 00356 21241667

Gallery Director: 00356 79041051​

 

OPENING HOURS

Wednesday to Saturday 14:00 - 19:00

Sunday to Tuesday Closed

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