Our friends from the Incipit project just sent some images of MTO’s latest interventions in Sliema, Malta and Sapri, Italy.The murals addresses the migration issue Europe confronts today by depicting the hyperrealistic image of a man entering trough one side of a building in Malta and coming out through another one in Italy.
The first part of the mural was painted for Sliema Arts Festival in Malta while the second part of the mural was created for Incipit Project in Sapri, Italy and are the continuation of a project started by MTO in 2014 with “The Mediterranean Door”, a mural created for the Malta street art festival at Sliema’s sea front (See last image below).
The artist’s statement:
” … MALTA TAKES THE DEAD AND SENDS THE LIVING TO ITALY…
[…] …This happened when Enrico Letta was prime minister of Italy. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat thanked the Italian government. The Maltese have accepted the dead, but not the living. Malta is too small to take in thousands of persons. But if someone is in danger at sea, they pick him up: it is not true they push him back in the water. Then they try not to keep him: that is true. They have a pragmatic approach, but not an inhuman one.”
He cites the example of the Migrant Offshore Aid Station an American couple of Italian origin, the Catambrones, who rigged a ship with drones purchased in the US, put together a crew and recruited the former head of the Maltese Armed Forces to try and pick up people from the sea. […] “Malta relies very much on an intervention in Libya. Joseph Muscat says that if we do not go into Libya, this problem will never be resolved … ”
“The Mediterranean Door” painted in 2014 in Malta:
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
