​Raphael Vella has been active as an artist, curator and researcher for many years and is currently a Professor of Art Education and Socially Engaged Art at the University of Malta. As an artist his interdisciplinary work addresses political issues and sites of assembly, fields of practice and institutions associated with medicine, education and care. He uses a broad range of media, particularly drawing and experimental stop motion video, and he has shown his work in several venues around the world, including the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch, New Zealand; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the US; Den Haag Sculptuur in the Netherlands; Modern Art Oxford gallery, UK; Domaine Pommery in Reims, France; Zona Imaginaria in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Palazzo Bembo in Venice, Italy; the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland; the EU Delegation Building in Washington DC, USA; Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta, Malta; and the Art Gallery of Burlington in Ontario, Canada. He has also curated art events in several art centres in Malta, and created the Valletta International Visual Arts festival in 2014. In 2017, he was co-curator of the Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and was selected to participate as an artist in the first edition of the Malta Biennale in Valletta in 2024. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and his books include Artist-Teachers in Context: International Dialogues (Sense, 2016), Art – Ethics – Education, co-edited with C.-P. Buschkühle and D. Atkinson (2020, Brill/Sense) and Documents of Socially Engaged Art, co-edited with M. Sarantou (2021, InSEA).

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Born and raised in Birgu, Chris Briffa (1974) set up his architectural studio in Valletta in 2004, aged 30. Since then, the studio has become synonymous with skilful design concerned with proportion, material and detail, flawlessly merging the historical with the new, and integrating passive-energy design concerns with bold elegance. The studio’s design projects range from original product design to revisiting traditional artefacts and new builds, often blurring the line between art and architecture. Besides overseeing commercial, residential and public projects locally, the award-winning studio is currently engaged with a number of international projects, and is committed to its involvement in the organisation of workshops and exhibitions aimed at raising design awareness across Malta and Gozo.

Chris studied at Virginia Tech (USA) and Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and is a graduate of the University of Malta, where he has since tutored hundreds of students within the Faculty of the Built Environment. He currently resides in Valletta with his wife Hanna and their three children.

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Michael Quinton is a sound designer and musical composer who has a PhD in designing sonification interfaces that represent astronomical data related to Exosolar planetary research. Michael started experimenting with sound at an early age playing pots and pans as a toddler which his mother says was the only thing that kept him quiet. These early experiments led to more serious explorations when he started to take music more seriously in his teenage years when playing in a band as a guitarist led him to experiment with effects pedals to create unusual sounds.

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His fascination with sampling and synthesis drove him into deeper explorations of how sound works and affects people’s lives. It was through sound design in theatre that he was able to start experimenting more with psychoacoustics, Synchresis and the development of complex, spatial soundscapes. Having a background in Urban Planning Michael had initiated a study of the Maltese Soundscape where he explored the sonic culture of Malta by conducting research in 10 different localities in Malta. As part of this study, he interviewed people from each locality to find out how they perceive and relate to sound. This work led to a collaborative study with Dr Yiannis Christidis from Cyprus where the Maltese Soundscape was compared to the soundscape of the city of Nicosia. Michael is conducting soundscape research with the Environment and Resources Authority (ERA) to study the Soundscape of Mdina and Spencer gardens in Marsa. Through his deeper explorations of psychoacoustics Michael started experimenting with Sonification which is the conversion of data into some form of non-verbal sonic representation. Having a love for astronomy he explored how sonification could represent astronomical data by first developing a sonic model of the Solar System which was designed so that it could be used in a Planetarium. He later won a scholarship at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland to carry out a PhD in the use of Sonification in Exosolar Planetary Astronomy to represent planets and Exosolar systems beyond our own solar system. He completed his PhD in 2021.

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As a song writer and sound designer Michael has composed and created numerous musical compositions and sound designs for theatre, animation, sound installations, video art, documentary, films and has also conducted research on live musical performance in Virtual Reality. He lectures part time at the University of Malta teaching Sound design to Theatre Students at Bachelors level.

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Project Manager: Marcon Borg Caruana
Graphic Design: 2point3