Valletta Contemporary
Interview: Sergio Muscat
Interviewed by Ann Dingli
December 2025
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Sergio Muscat (b. 1978, Malta) is a photographer and digital artist whose practice blends photography, code and abstraction. Educated in computer science and holding a Master’s Degree in digital art, he treats images as evolving material, exploring memory, legacy and perception through iterative, system-driven processes that deconstruct and reassemble his lifelong photographic archive. His work has featured in solo and group exhibitions in Malta and internationally, often pushing the boundaries between analogue and digital practice. Muscat lives and works on the island of Gozo. His recent solo show Memorial Immortal at Valletta Contemporary reflects on how personal histories are shaped by technology and time. He speaks here to Ann Dingli about his work.
Sergio Muscat, Photoclasm #6901, 2025, Museum Glade Gyclee on Hahnemuhle Smooth Cotton Rag, 30x45cm, Limited Edition of 10.
Ann Dingli (AD): In the show's curatorial description, the formal approach to the pieces is described as 'Photoclasm' – a new and personal term. What does it mean, and what is its lateral provenance in art history/theory? What does it link to?
Sergio Muscat (SM): When I thought of the term ‘Photoclasm’, I was trying to name a formal attitude rather than a single technique. The word leans deliberately on iconoclasm, the breaking of images that are treated as fixed, authoritative, almost sacred. Photography has its own kind of ‘icon’: the culturally embedded promise that a photograph is a stable proof, a clean slice of time, a dependable witness. Photoclasm is my way of describing the moment I start to fracture that promise from the inside.
Formally, it means I treat the photograph less as a still, singular ‘capture’ and more as a site of impact, where multiple durations, gestures, and viewpoints can collide. The work becomes a kind of controlled breakage, splitting the unity of the moment, interrupting the comfort of legibility, and letting the image carry evidence of its own making. It’s not destruction for spectacle; it’s a way of making room for what the medium usually edits out: hesitation, drift, repetition, bleed, afterimage. It’s about treating the image as raw material to release its energy - cracking the photograph's indexicality, allowing it to mutate.
Its lateral provenance is broad, and I’m happy for it to be porous. It’s in conversation with the avant-gardes that treated photography as something to be cut, reassembled, and
re-authored rather than merely taken: collage, montage, darkroom intervention, and the general lineage of “expanded” photography. It fits squarely into modernism's break from representation and challenges the ubiquitous authority of photographs, in the same way that 20th century art challenged the media of their time just about a century ago. It also sits beside more contemporary attitudes that question photographic truth through error, compression, and the productive aesthetics of the glitch. Not because I’m interested in novelty, but because “failure” often looks a lot like memory.
Ultimately, Photoclasm links to the show’s core tension: memorial and immortal as competing instincts. I’m not trying to preserve a moment intact. I’m trying to show what it costs to try.
Sergio Muscat, Photoclasm Transition 7348 (200 layers), 2025, Video Work from 200-layer Photoclasm UHD 4K, 6m18s, Limited Edition of 3.
AD: The works you collated for the show were said to be a visual commentary on memories in motion. This runs counter to the nature of photography, which by virtue of its very medium, is used to stop time – to immortalise a moment in immutable stillness. What did it feel like to work in an approach of fundamental opposition – between your theoretical explorations and the medium's innateness?
SM: I actually don’t experience it as working against photography so much as working against the myth of photography. The camera is often described as a machine for stopping time, but the truth is more complicated: every photograph is already a duration. Exposure is time. Looking is time. Remembering, triggered by the photograph, is time again, moving through you.
That said, yes, the process began as a kind of friction, stemming from much of my previous projects which have approached this thematic from different directions. There’s a stubbornness in the medium: it wants to crystallise, to name, to finalise. Memory, as well as the emotional association that comes with it, doesn’t behave that way. Memory mutates as you touch it. It loops. It skips. It returns with different lighting. So to make “memories in motion,” I had to accept that a conventional, cleanly resolved photographic moment would often be the wrong container. Throughout my career, I’ve sought to explore ways to retain the essence of what images represent, and that often involves removing the overpowering physical representation, to uncover what lies beneath. We often get so caught up in what’s right in front of us that we are unable to look further, deeper.
What that felt like, emotionally, was a mixture of resistance and permission. Resistance because you’re constantly negotiating with an instrument designed to stabilise. Permission because once you stop demanding that the image behave like proof, photography becomes incredibly elastic. The “opposition” turns into a method: I can ask the photograph to hold not just what happened, but how it keeps happening, as recollection, as haunting, as recurrence.
So the work becomes less about freezing and more about compressing—like pressing layers of time together until they leave a mark. If there’s a paradox, I leaned into it. I wanted the viewer to feel the image doing what memory does: refusing to sit still, while still leaving something behind that you can return to.
AD: The works you collated for the show were said to be a visual commentary on memories in motion. This runs counter to the nature of photography, which by virtue of its very medium, is used to stop time – to immortalise a moment in immutable stillness. What did it feel like to work in an approach of fundamental opposition – between your theoretical explorations and the medium's innateness?
SM: I actually don’t experience it as working against photography so much as working against the myth of photography. The camera is often described as a machine for stopping time, but the truth is more complicated: every photograph is already a duration. Exposure is time. Looking is time. Remembering, triggered by the photograph, is time again, moving through you.
That said, yes, the process began as a kind of friction, stemming from much of my previous projects which have approached this thematic from different directions. There’s a stubbornness in the medium: it wants to crystallise, to name, to finalise. Memory, as well as the emotional association that comes with it, doesn’t behave that way. Memory mutates as you touch it. It loops. It skips. It returns with different lighting. So to make “memories in motion,” I had to accept that a conventional, cleanly resolved photographic moment would often be the wrong container. Throughout my career, I’ve sought to explore ways to retain the essence of what images represent, and that often involves removing the overpowering physical representation, to uncover what lies beneath. We often get so caught up in what’s right in front of us that we are unable to look further, deeper.
What that felt like, emotionally, was a mixture of resistance and permission. Resistance because you’re constantly negotiating with an instrument designed to stabilise. Permission because once you stop demanding that the image behave like proof, photography becomes incredibly elastic. The “opposition” turns into a method: I can ask the photograph to hold not just what happened, but how it keeps happening, as recollection, as haunting, as recurrence.
So the work becomes less about freezing and more about compressing—like pressing layers of time together until they leave a mark. If there’s a paradox, I leaned into it. I wanted the viewer to feel the image doing what memory does: refusing to sit still, while still leaving something behind that you can return to.
Sergio Muscat, Photoclasm #0691, 2025, Museum Glade Gyclee on Hahnemuhle Smooth Cotton Rag, 30x45cm, Limited Edition of 10.
AD: You talk a lot about the convergence and ceaselessness of time within, or represented by, the work. Is this subject part of a personal narrative that is important to you? Death, birth, aging – are these relevant themes to your process?
SM: It’s personal in the way weather is personal: you live inside it even when you’re not speaking about it directly. I don’t think I became interested in time as an abstract ‘theme’ first. I think I became attentive to it because life insists on it, through loss, through tenderness, through the body changing, through the quiet violence of ordinary days passing. We dream of infinity, but live in the finite and face it at every turn.
Death, birth, and aging are relevant to my process, but not as illustrative subjects I set out to depict. They’re more like gravitational forces that shape the work’s logic. A death teaches you that a person can become a set of fragments: objects, sounds, habits, places, sentences you replay. Birth teaches you the opposite, that a whole new timeline can begin and immediately rewrite your sense of before and after. Aging is the slow merge of these realities: you watch time accumulate in the face, the posture, the way you carry memory physically.
When I talk about convergence and ceaselessness, I’m describing how these experiences collapse chronology. The past is not ‘over’ just because it’s behind you; it keeps arriving. The present is rarely singular; it’s layered with earlier versions of itself. In that sense, the work is a practice of staying with complexity rather than resolving it. I’m interested in images that don’t simply say “this happened,” but instead ask, “how does this continue to happen inside us?”
So yes, there is a personal narrative, but I try to keep it porous enough that it doesn’t become a private code. The emotional engine is mine, but the condition is shared: we’re all living in time, and time does not stop being intimate.
AD: Can you talk about the technological development you've authored behind the scenes and behind your photography? How do you make these images – technically speaking?
SM: Technically, the work comes out of treating the photograph as something authored over time rather than taken in a single instant. I’ve built a workflow that lets me gather time as material - through sequences, layered exposures, and controlled variations - and then sculpt that material into one image that still carries the feeling of motion and accumulation.
The capture stage is only the beginning. I am, as many of us are in this digital age, often collecting multiple frames that belong to the same emotional “moment,” even if they’re separated by seconds or minutes. Sometimes the camera is stable and the scene moves; sometimes the camera moves and the scene is fixed; sometimes both are drifting. What matters is that I’m collecting a small architecture of time, not a single decisive slice. That is my archive, unedited, unadulterated, raw.
Behind the scenes, I’ve developed a set of tools and procedures, partly technical (computer code that essentially manipulates and reconstructs images in various ways), partly conceptual, for translating that temporal material into an image that doesn’t collapse into chaos. There’s a lot of calibration: aligning, offsetting, and selectively blending elements so that the final work retains legibility without becoming rigid. I’m attentive to the point where the eye understands form, but the body senses duration (and emotion). That’s where the image starts to behave like memory rather than documentation.
I also treat output as part of the technology. Colour management, tonal decisions, and print preparation aren’t afterthoughts; they’re how the work becomes stable enough to hold its internal instability. The images that go to print are manually edited to finish, and sometimes end up being quite far off from the original output. The end result is a still object, yes—but it’s a stillness that has been earned through movement. It’s an image with time trapped inside it, not erased from it.
Sergio Muscat, Photoclasm #6660, 2025, Museum Glade Gyclee on Hahnemuhle Smooth Cotton Rag, 30x45cm, Limited Edition of 10.
AD: Can you comment on what you think the state of photography is in Malta. This show was put up in Valletta – do you think the capital, as representative of the islands' artistic landscape, is a strong enough platform for photographic experiment and evolution locally?
SM: Malta’s photography scene sits in an interesting tension. On one hand, there’s real talent and a strong visual sensitivity here: people who can see, frame, and articulate place and identity with precision. On the other hand, photography is still too often culturally assigned to certain roles: documentation, tourism, heritage, event coverage, reportage. Those are valid modes, but they can become a ceiling when experimentation is treated as a detour rather than a central artistic practice. I have always felt that we keep placing these artificial limits onto ourselves, thinking “these are the rules”, or “this is how things should be done”. I want to shatter that mindset, not by showing new limits, but by showing that there are none.
What I think we need more of, alongside making, is infrastructure for risk: curatorial frameworks that invite photographic work to be strange, slow, and unresolved; critical writing that takes photography seriously as contemporary art; production support (labs, printing access, technical mentorship); and spaces where artists can show work that doesn’t immediately translate into a single, easily digestible image. We need to shed the fear of weird, because everything that is art is about breaking rules, challenging the status quo, and exposing the world to what it doesn’t yet know, see and experience.
Valletta is both an opportunity and a mirror. As a capital, it concentrates visibility - institutions, footfall, cultural attention - and that matters. If you want local photographic evolution to be legible, it helps to place it in the centre rather than the margins. At the same time, Valletta can lean toward the polished and the presentable, partly because it’s always performing itself to visitors. Experimental art sometimes needs the opposite: permission to be awkward, intimate, and uncompromising.
So do I think Valletta is a strong enough platform? It can be, when it chooses to be: when it gives itself the permission to be. The platform exists; the question is how bravely it’s used. My hope is that shows like this argue, gently but firmly, for photography, and art in general in Malta to be more than an image of Malta; to be a laboratory, a language, and a place where the medium is allowed to change, evolve and become.