Valletta’s ‘Fallen Angels’: Why Malta Can’t Stop Talking About 27 Hanging Statues

A conversation about ‘Fallen Angels’ – and why Valletta is talking about it over pastizzi
By Sarah Galea, Hot Malta contributor

“Mela, have you seen the angels?”
The question ricochets across Republic Street every morning this week, whispered between kiosk owners, debated by pensioners on the City Gate benches, and posted on TikTok by teens who rarely set foot inside a church. The angels in question are not the marble kind that watch over Grand Master tombs; they are the 27 life-size resin figures that hang, face-down, from the coffered ceiling of St James Cavalier in the new community-curated installation “Fallen Angels – A Maltese Conversation”.

Conceived by Berlin-based Maltese artist Deborah Falzon and co-produced with Valletta 2018 legacy fund, the show opened quietly on 3 May but has already become the capital’s most talked-about free attraction. Each angel is moulded from 3-D scans of local residents: a Marsa dockworker, a Gozitan midwife, two teenage twins from Żejtun, even a 92-year-old former RAF fitter who still drinks his tea at Café Cordina. Suspended mid-air, wings bent like broken umbrella spokes, the figures glow with internal LED strips that shift from sulphur yellow to blood orange as dusk creeps through the gun-slits.

Yet the real art is happening underneath them. Visitors are handed a postcard and invited to finish the sentence: “The day I fell, ______.” By closing time the floor is a carpet of cardboard confessions – some in Maltese, some in English, one scribbled entirely in paw-print stickers by a seven-year-old from Sliema. Volunteers from the Jesuit Refugee Service later collect the cards, anonymise them, and feed them into a live projection that scrolls across the stone walls like a secular scripture.

Why is this resonating so deeply? Because “falling” is a metaphor Maltese people understand in their bones. We speak of qiegħ daqs l-art (low as the ground) when bankruptcy hits; we joke that “min jaqla’ l-art, jitla’ l-art” (whoever hits the floor will rise) even as we know some never do. The islands’ suicide rate jumped 18 % between 2020 and 2022, the highest spike in the EU. Meanwhile, the National Statistics Office reports that 41 % of 15-year-olds feel “persistently sad or hopeless”. In a country where parish pride still equates mental struggle with weak faith, the installation offers a rare public space where falling is not equated with failing.

Tourism operators have noticed. Usually May footfall is driven by cruise-ship day-trippers hunting for fridge magnets. This year hostel owners in Strait Street say nightly bookings are up 30 % among 20-something Europeans who saw the angels on Instagram and decided to stay. “They come for the ‘pic’, but they end up crying in the corner, then buying ħobż biż-żejt from my neighbour,” laughs Marthese Camilleri, manager of the two-star Granny’s Inn. Even the usually reticent Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association has praised the “ripple of empathy” boosting off-season revenue.

Not everyone is enchanted. A spokesperson for the Archdiocese expressed “concern at the desacralisation of angelic imagery”, while conservative NGO Pro Malta Christiana launched an online petition claiming the show “promotes victim culture”. The curators respond by pointing to the final room: a quiet chapel where a single angel lies on the floor, wings folded into a cradle. Visitors may light a candle or simply sit. On Tuesday evening, a priest from the nearby Collegiate Parish of St Paul’s Shipwreck slipped in, read a few postcards, and left without comment. The candles he lit are still burning.

Back outside, the city feels subtly altered. A group of elderly domino players who usually curse at pigeons have started greeting strangers with “Ejja, tell us about a time you fell”. A pop-up support desk run by Richmond Foundation volunteers has registered 150 first-time counselling enquiries in five days. And the pastizzeria across the square has renamed its largest ricotta pastizz the “Fallen Angel” – 50 cent from each sale goes to mental-health NGOs. Sold out by 10 a.m.

When the installation closes on 1 July the angels will be dismantled and recycled into playground equipment in Ħamrun. But the cards, now numbering in the thousands, will be archived at the National Library under the title “Il-Ħruq ta’ Ħaddieħor” (Somebody Else’s Fire). Curator Falzon insists the project is not about spectacle but continuity: “We wanted to create a hinge moment – where falling stops being a private shame and becomes a collective story we can retell, like the Great Siege or the Sette Giugno riots.”

In other words, Malta has always carved its memory into limestone; this time we are carving it into each other. So next time you queue for your karozzin ride, look up. The angels are leaving. The conversation, if we choose, stays airborne.