Art on the Brink: How Malta’s Creative Scene is Fighting Eviction One Studio at a Time

# Art: Are You Safe?
*How Malta’s Creative Pulse is Fighting for Survival in the Age of Rising Rents and Vanishing Venues*

Valletta’s Strait Street hasn’t been this quiet since the 1980s. The jazz bars that once spilled saxophone solos onto the cobbles are shuttered; the pink neon of the old “Atlantic Bar” now flickers only in tourist selfies. Walk further into the capital and you’ll spot fresh plywood where galleries used to be. In their place: short-let apartments promising “authentic Maltese loft living” at €180 a night.

The question “Art: are you safe?” is no longer rhetorical on the islands—it’s a daily SOS sent out by painters, dancers, muralists and poets who watch their studios flip into Airbnbs faster than you can say “UPC permit”.

## Culture vs. Concrete
Malta’s GDP may have doubled since 2013, but the number of affordable cultural spaces has halved. A 2022 survey by the Valletta Cultural Agency shows 68 % of local artists now work from home because external studios became financially “unsustainable”. Meanwhile, the Malta Tourism Authority’s latest figures reveal 28 % of all residential properties in Sliema, St Julian’s and Valletta are holiday lets—many of them carved out of former artist warehouses.

“It’s death by a thousand keystrokes,” says Roxanne Gatt, a multimedia artist whose Birkirkara studio was evicted last year after the landlord listed the building on Booking.com. “Every click from a tourist is a nail in the coffin for someone painting, rehearsing or editing here.”

## The Village Core Resistance
Yet Malta’s creative pulse is refusing flat-line. In villages where limestone alleys still echo with church bells, community-led hubs are popping up like paint drips on a primed canvas.

Take Sliema’s *Strada Stretta Concept*, a former gentlemen’s club turned non-profit theatre. Run by volunteers, it hosts everything from queer cabaret to Baroque opera on a budget thinner than pastizz pastry. Further north, the Gozo Contemporary Arts Centre turned a disused Victoria school into 14 live-work studios, offering €250-a-month leases protected by a 25-year covenant with the Ministry for Gozo.

“Security of tenure is everything,” says director Joseph Paul Cassar. “Artists can’t breathe if they’re checking rental alerts every six months.”

Even the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra has joined the occupation game, squatting legally in a roofless 18th-century hospital ward in Floriana while lobbying for a permanent home. Their open-air *Caravaggio* concert last July drew 3,000 listeners and raised €40,000—half earmarked for soundproofing, half donated to emerging musicians who lost gigs during the pandemic.

## Policy, Permits and the Price of Everything
Government schemes exist, but artists argue they’re either under-funded or over-complicated. The *Arts Council Malta*’s *Creative Industries* fund offers up to €20,000 in capital grants, yet requires 50 % matching funds—impossible for a collective already priced out of their workshop.

A new *Urban Conservation Area* draft, leaked last month, proposes tax breaks for owners who rent to registered cultural operators at below-market rates. Critics call it “too little, too aesthetic”, pointing out that enforcement history is patchy: of 22 properties awarded similar incentives in 2018, only nine are still occupied by creatives.

## What Happens If Art Leaves?
Lose the artists and you don’t just lose exhibitions—you lose the soft power that fuels Malta’s €2 billion tourism engine. Curator and *Valletta 2018* alumna Ann Laerke Olsen puts it bluntly: “No one books a €600 flight to stare at empty façades. They come for the noise, the studio visits, the risk of seeing something raw.”

Raw is exactly what’s threatened. At *Spazju Kreattiv* in the capital, an upcoming retrospective of sculptor Antonio Sciortino—Malta’s answer to Rodin—hangs in the balance after engineers discovered structural cracks. Without €500,000 in urgent repairs, the exhibition could tour to Dubai instead, taking 14,000 projected visitors (and their café receipts) with it.

## The Average Citizen’s Role
Safety for art isn’t a top-down decree; it’s a neighbourhood choice. When *Zabbar* residents crowdfunded €8,000 to keep local printmaker Pierre Portelli in his corner storefront, footfall in the village square rose 30 %, according to council data. Cafés extended hours; the parish youth group started silk-screen workshops. Art, anchored, became economic ballast.

## Conclusion
Malta stands at a crossroads between becoming an open-air museum of closed doors or a living, breathing canvas. The difference boils down to three things: rent regulation that bites, public-private leases measured in decades not months, and citizens who choose to attend, donate, volunteer—who decide that a rehearsal space is as vital as a parking lot.

So next time you scroll past a fundraiser for a dance company or a pop-up exhibition in a garage, click “share” instead of “skip”. Because if art isn’t safe here, none of us really are.