Commoditising rubble in Maltese suburbia : a photo-essay

Abstract

These photos reflect an attempt to read house facades as texts, to decode the cultural meanings disclosed and disguised by the practical materiality of stone. They also aim to highlight a specific moment in Maltese history, when rubble itself came to be commoditised, appropriated and invested with new meanings. Frozen in time and objectified by the camera lens, it becomes possible to perceive rubble as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, M: 1984) and to question the latent symbolism in terms of which taste is formed and expressed in practice. The focus is on a specific application of rubble known in Maltese as sejjiegh dekorattiv, or decorative rubble. Until recently, rubble was considered primarily as a waste product, or at best as material for the thrifty farmer to use in building the hitan tas-sejjiegh, the dry-stone retaining walls which still surround fields in the agricultural areas left intact from encroachment by Malta’s urban sprawl. Sometime during the late 1980’s, the weathered stones from dismantled or collapsed dry-stone walls were gathered and their outer surfaces sawn away in laminae about an inch thick. These laminae, weathered and rugged on one side, freshly cut and smooth on the other, were then glued side by side to the facades of newly built houses. The neatly cut white limestone ashlar masonry in which these facades had been built was concealed beneath the collage of darkened and irregularly shaped slices of rubble. At first glance, the areas treated in this way, evoked a rubble wall. [Excerpt]