Inside Valletta’s Creative Heart: designMT Exhibition At The Valletta Design Cluster
As part of this year’s designMT expo, the Valletta Design Cluster (VDC) has opened its historic doors to showcase three striking installations that blur the lines between art, design, and lived experience.
Housed within the Old Abattoir, a 17th-century complex that once served as a slaughterhouse, soldiers’ barracks, and later even bakeries, the VDC is today a cultural hub for innovation and creativity.
Its layered past provides a dramatic backdrop for a set of contemporary works that challenge perceptions of material, memory, and meaning.
Here’s a closer look at what’s on show:
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Nico Conti – Votive Forms
Maltese ceramicist Nico Conti fuses traditional porcelain with cutting-edge 3D printing to create delicate, translucent works inspired by votive candles. His “Votive Forms” glow softly as light passes through, capturing both the fragility and quiet resilience of porcelain. A balance of digital precision and natural material, his collection invites reflection and calm.
Yang Tang – Slowness as Resistance: A Dialogue in Cloth
Having relocated from China to Malta in 2023, artist Yang Tang uses textiles to explore themes of belonging, resistance, and memory. Her hand-dyed cotton and embroidered bags are more than functional, they are vessels of emotion, abstraction, and transformation. Each piece feels like a story stitched into fabric, marking her transition between cultures and creative directions.
Luis Muñoz Jean Baptiste – The Midnight Fracture
Graphic designer and Bureau 105 co-founder Luis Muñoz Jean Baptiste delivers an atmospheric installation that feels like stepping into a fractured dream. With cursed newspapers, poison bottles, and portraits twisted out of recognition, “The Midnight Fracture” is part theatre, part confession, a surreal universe where the grotesque and poetic co-exist. Darkly humorous and immersive, it unsettles as much as it fascinates.
With just three exhibitors, the Valletta Design Cluster show is intimate yet powerful, proving that contemporary design is as much about ideas and emotions as it is about objects. Visitors are invited to explore not only the pieces but also the building itself, a place where Malta’s layered history meets its creative future.
The Valletta exhibition is just one part of designMT, which runs from 29th September to 4th October across Valletta.
Free to attend, it offers a chance to see how Malta’s designers are blending tradition with modernity, crafting works that are as functional as they are meaningful.
designMT is being organised by the Malta Crafts Foundation, with the support of Arts Council Malta, Heritage Malta, the Industrial Property Registrations Unit within the Commerce Department, Malta Digital Innovation Authority, Malta Enterprise, and Visit Malta; and in collaboration with the MIDA – MALTA Interior Design Association, Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta Cultural Agency; and Lovin Malta as Media Partners.
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