Valletta’s Silent Sensation: Inside the Harbour Warehouse Teaching Malta to Listen Again
**In the Hush of the Harbour: How “Wens, Comfortable Silence” is Teaching Valletta to Listen Again**
Valletta’s streets rarely stay quiet for long. Between the brass bands rehearsing in the Upper Barrakka gardens, the ferry horns echoing across Grand Harbour and the clatter of pastizzi trays at dawn, the capital’s soundscape is as layered as its limestone. Yet for three weeks this autumn, a disused 17th-century grain warehouse just beneath the Siege Bell has become the loudest silent space on the island. Inside, Maltese-German artist and sound-architect Marlene Wens has installed *Comfortable Silence*, an immersive artwork that invites visitors to surrender their phones, shoes and—hardest of all—small-talk, then simply listen to the building breathe.
Wens, 38, who grew up in Sliema but trained in Berlin, describes the piece as “a sonic reset button for a nation that’s forgotten how to pause.” She spent six months recording the warehouse at different tides, capturing the creak of mooring ropes, the drip of groundwater and the faint heartbeat of carnival drums drifting over from Floriana. These fragments are replayed at barely-audible levels through 32 speakers embedded in the limestone walls. The effect is uncanny: you feel Malta’s maritime subconscious before you hear it.
Local reception has been startling. In the first fortnight alone, 4,700 visitors—more than the monthly footfall of the National Museum of Archaeology—have queued for the 25-minute slot, despite no advertising beyond a single Facebook event shared by lecturer-cum-culture-activist Prof. Ramona Attard. “We Maltese are terrified of silence,” Attard laughs, waiting in line with first-year MCAST students. “We equate quiet with hospitals or confession booths. Marlene is proving silence can be communal, even festive.”
That communal angle is precisely what drew Arts Council Malta to fund the project under its “Harbour Histories” strand. Chairman Albert Marshall explains: “After the pandemic we noticed rising levels of social fatigue. People wanted culture, but not crowds; reflection, but not isolation. Wens offered a third way—shared solitude.” The warehouse, earmarked for conversion into luxury apartments, has been granted a stay of execution until December while developers negotiate with Heritage Malta. In the meantime, Wens has negotiated something rarer: a truce between developers, residents and itinerant artists who have long squatted the site.
Inside, the rules are strict: no photos, no speaking, no looping back once your circuit ends. A soft-footed attendant—usually a retired dockworker in socks—guides you up a raw-lime ramp to the roofless upper floor where moonlight pools like quicksilver. Here, the city’s normal soundtrack is inverted. Instead of traffic, you hear the faint rasp of a fisherman mending nets on the opposite quay; instead of church bells, the metallic sigh of a crane unloading Turkish limestone. One visitor, 71-year-old Cospicua resident Graziella Cassar, emerged in tears. “I haven’t heard my late husband’s boat since he passed in 2019,” she whispered. “Tonight the wood spoke again.”
Such testimonies are stacking up. A pop-up “Silence Booth” in the foyer invites guests to jot reflections on recycled fishing paper. Cards are pegged anonymously, forming a fluttering archive of urban emotion. Recurring themes emerge: guilt over endless construction, nostalgia for festa fireworks that now trigger PTSD, surprise at discovering one’s own pulse. Wens plans to digitise the cards and embed them as QR codes in the future apartment foyer—an auditory time-capsule no realtor can erase.
Beyond the poetic, the project is yielding pragmatic fruit. Valletta’s restaurant owners report a 19 % uptick in week-night bookings from visitors who, after emerging “hungry for conversation”, linger over rabbit stew and local Syrah. Meanwhile, Għaxaq primary school has adopted the concept for mindfulness sessions, replacing bells with recorded harbour hush. Even the Malta Society of Tinnitus Sufferers has endorsed the installation, claiming 30 % of members experienced temporary relief after a session—possibly due to the 432-hertz drone Wens buried beneath the ambient track, a frequency used in Sicilian chant traditions.
Critics argue the piece romanticises dereliction while the city hemorrhages affordable housing. Wens counters that silence is the first step towards accountability. “You can’t plan a future you can’t hear,” she told *Times of Malta* last week. On Friday, she will host a free public forum in the warehouse entitled “What Sounds Should Valletta Keep?” Residents are invited to bring recordings—grandmother’s kettle, the old bus ticket punch, children’s hopscotch chants—that might form part of a permanent “Quiet Museum”, a counterpart to the planned MUŻA extension.
As the final ferry horn fades each evening, the warehouse doors close at 10 p.m. sharp. Outside, the city’s hum reboots instantly: revving motorbikes, animated debates over football transfers, the metallic clack of balcony shutters. Yet something subtle has shifted. Walking back up Triq il-Lvant, you notice couples pausing to listen for the lift machinery inside the 1920s elevator, or tourists silencing their Instagram reels to catch the echo of a pigeon’s wings. Comfortable silence, it seems, travels lighter than any souvenir.
Wens departs for Rotterdam next month, but she leaves behind a challenge: to treat every limestone crack as a potential speaker, every shared pause as civic glue. In a country where decibels often drown out dialogue, that might be the most radical artwork of all.
