Malta’s URNA Turns Heads Globally With Bold Rethink Of Death At The London Design Biennale
Malta’s national entry at this year’s London Design Biennale has captured international attention, with glowing features in Wallpaper, The Spaces, and The Double Negative. The installation — titled URNA — is a poetic and radical reimagining of how we honour the dead.
On display at Somerset House until the end of June, URNA invites visitors to confront mortality through a Maltese perspective, shaped by ritual, community, and stone. It’s a powerful moment for Maltese design on the world stage — and one that’s starting serious conversations well beyond our shores.
“My hope is that URNA leaves an imprint,” says designer Anthony Bonnici.
“Not as an object, but as a question. I think that URNA is not a monument to death but an architecture of passage, where matter and ritual intersect. URNA is a physical manifestation of a transient confrontation with the fragility of permanence itself. I do not want the audience to simply observe URNA. I want them to experience its gravity — the slow pull of time, the shifting weight of material, the space it occupies within themselves. I want them to leave with the provocative realisation that architecture is not about permanence but about transformation. That to build is to acknowledge eventual ruin. That in the end, we do not own matter, we borrow it, momentarily, before it returns to something beyond us.”
More than just a memorial, URNA is a challenge to our modern rituals around death. It’s a reminder that everything we build — even in grief — is temporary. And that’s precisely where its power lies.
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A Collective Embrace Of Mortality
URNA — named after the vessel traditionally used to hold cremated remains — moves away from the idea of solitary graves. It imagines a landscape of spherical limestone urns, each holding ashes, forming a shared, reflective resting place.
These reconstituted Maltese stone spheres are arranged like a constellation, a field of memory. “Each unit is part of a larger whole, like stars in a galaxy,” says curator and architect Andrew Borg Wirth. The result is gentle, radical, and deeply moving.
Carved From Stone, Shaped By Change
Malta’s relationship with stone burial stretches back thousands of years — from megalithic temples to underground catacombs. URNA draws from that heritage but looks forward. It’s not nostalgic; it’s transformative.
The installation also arrives just a few years after Malta legalised cremation. URNA uses this moment of cultural shift to ask: what should mourning and remembrance look like in the 21st century?
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Design Meets Ritual In A Living Collaboration
The installation is the result of a creative alliance between artists, architects, and designers including Anthony Bonnici, Tanil Raif, Matthew Attard Navarro, Anne Immelé, Stephanie Sant, and Thomas Mifsud. Their combined efforts have produced an environment that blends architecture, photography, performance and film into a sensory experience.
The result is more than an artwork. It is a space for contemplation, memory and presence. Visitors move through it slowly, absorbing its silence and scale. It makes room for grief, without dictating how it should be expressed.
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Reflecting The Surface
This year’s Biennale theme, “Surface Reflections,” asks how design can challenge what we take for granted. URNA responds by turning a quarry — a place of extraction — into a site of memory. The urns, worn and imperfect, reflect both the people they honour and the society that created them.
A Vision That Reaches Beyond Malta
What makes URNA so compelling is its ability to take something deeply local — Maltese stone, Maltese ritual, Maltese questions — and present it in a way that resonates globally. That’s why it’s been picked up by international design media and why it’s sparking conversation in London and beyond.
More than an installation, URNA is a proposal for how we might confront loss with dignity, design, and shared space.
Malta’s URNA is on display at Somerset House from 5th to 29th June 2025, as part of the London Design Biennale.
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