mqabba
you.
you are there, all around me.
today, we look back at each other.
yes, we know each other very well.
I step off the plane.
and then it hits me hard – that dry and sweet air.
we have visited this island more than twenty times.
bougainvillea.
its vivid pink plumes
strewn, scattered along the sides of roads.
filling up the courtyard of our grandfather’s garden.
the humming humming
cicadas.
traffic whirrs
this landscape,
made of shadow
and light
we had heard the music together
we had laughed often day and night
gremxula, you said.
now I watch the sun pouring down onto that golden earth
the dust disturbed by our foot steps
its particles hang in the void
captured by beams of light
a pool
lacquered with dancing light
mouth agape
the inside of a cave
empty.
waiting
your voice calls out and claps back from the walls in a multitude of echoes
our eyes saw each other's eyes.
we are looking back at each other.
This is a series of images I captured at a limestone quarry in Malta. My grandfather was from Malta, so I hold an emotional connection to the place, having visited many times throughout my life.
For me, being on the island is always a distinct sensory experience, upon arrival I am flooded with a barrage of sensations; the dry air, the heat, the murmur of insects, this all mixed together with childhood nostalgia and memories.
I discovered the quarry whilst researching and filming a project that I’ve been working on for several years, a filmic portrait based on the Maltese architect and writer Richard England. Limestone is an integral building block of the island and also Richard’s structures, the warm ochre fills the entirety of the island’s landscape.
My film looks into the life story of Richard and his creative output within the context of Maltese culture. As we’ve gone through this journey we’ve formed a relationship that feels reminiscent of something between grandparent and grandchild, with him being in his 80s, which in turn makes me think of my grandfather.
The text above is a conversation between myself as an adult and myself as a child, as every time I encounter this space they are in constant dialogue and inform my experience of it.
The quarry is a space that is forever evolving, as the stone is being continually carved into and excavated. For me the quarry becomes more than a site of extraction, it’s a sensory landscape, a place where the body registers the collision of deep time and human touch. Space appears to expand inward, embodying both volume and absence.
Genevieve Lutkin is an artist working in photography and moving image based in London.
Photos and Text by Genevieve Lutkin
When Voice Moves Mountains
Rooting the artistic research of this project around the earthquake-prone area of my hometown back in Central Italy, it all started from the small thought that —from a linguistic point of view— when using the term grounded we always refer to something very stable, based, founded without considering the possibilities that unstable grounds could evoke. I invested my energies into inquiring and experimenting with embodied ways of relating to the instability of the ground beneath our feet, looking into vocal-deep listening practices and weaving together vocal, post-humanist, new materialist and de-colonial discourses.
Indeed, connecting geological and human time, When Voice Moves Mountains is a sound installation which subverts the use of the metal pipes from the TABOO Faultline Observatory in the region Marche, Italy. If in this earthquake-prone region they act as extractive elements, in this narration they evolve as sensible mediators of sonic data. Visitors can interact with the pipes to perceive vocal acts (listing the layers of soil composing the mountains around the area) and underground frequencies (recorded in my region with a VLF diy antenna) as sculpting agents of a space, allowing bodies to become conductors of voices, vibrations, frequencies.
When Voice Moves Mountains explores ways of relating to the instability of the ground beneath our feet and to the data we extract from it. In the 19th century, seismology combined human observations of tremors—gathered through bodily experience—offering a much more multidisciplinary approach than the segmented, precise, and isolated methods we apply today. I am wondering how bodies can be brought back into the scene and how we might develop a different perception of the ground through embodied practices and sonic mediations. Also, is there a way to make the land legible through a different type of mediation? By connecting geological and human time, the work embodies a shift from time as a quantitative measure (collecting data) to time as a lived, qualitative experience (sensing data). Perhaps an alternative way of perceiving those unstable grounds through embodied practices can lead us to imagine different possibilities into moving geological and human times in resonance with one another.
In this frame, experiencing earthquakes becomes a way to get in touch with the timescale of seismic forces, resulting in a work which enacts a form of design that is situated, embodied, and generative of new forms of relationality. It not only reflects on the local—both geologically and culturally—but also contributes to the invention of a shared, affective commons at a larger scale. Indeed, establishing a relationship and having some sort of dialogue with the environment becomes fundamental to moving towards a post-extractivist society.
Giulia del Gobbo is an Italian interdisciplinary designer and curator currently based in The Netherlands. Her work is developed at the intersection of critical design, embodied and curatorial practices, with a particular interest in writing and creating performative open-source spaces.
She holds a degree in Product Design at the University of the Studies of Ferrara —with insights of Interior Architecture at HFT Stuttgart—, a MA in Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Arts and a MA Cum Laude in Critical Inquiry Lab from Design Academy Eindhoven 2024.
Photos by Francesco Costantini
Água e Pedra
Valle Verzasca, Ticino
Peter Zumthor - Thinking Architecture
If the naturalism and graphic virtuosity of architectural portrayal are too great, if they lack „open patches“ where our imagination and curiosity about the reality of the drawing can penetrate the image, the portrayal itself becomes the object of our desire, and our longing for the reality wanes because there is little or nothing in the representation that points to the intended reality beyond it. The portrayal no longer holds a promise. It refers only to itself.
Caplutta Sogn Benedetg, Grischun
“A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at ... within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience”, John Berger writes in his book on drawing. However, the same observation can be applied to the photograph.
Left: Spring, Forest Zurich, Right: Museo La Congiunta, Ticino
In a world dominated by the eye, the other senses are increasingly marginalized. The excess of visual stimuli fosters a sense of distance, leading to a life lived on the surface —as Juhani Pallasmaa describes in The Eyes of the Skin: “The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority.”
Left: Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp, Le Corbusier, Right: Ruin Caplutta Sogn Benedetg, Grischun
This series tries to offer a counterpoint to visual dominance: images that remain open rather than complete; images not merely to be seen, but to be remembered, felt, and stimulating the viewers imagination. These shown photographs are not mere portrayals of space—they are inviting. Each image invites imagination, invites memory to seep in. By avoiding of being to over defined; they are not finished and perfectly ducomentary photographies. Instead, they hold open patches—spaces for the viewer to enter, dream, and remember - to feel with every sense.
Left: Ruin Caplutta Sogn Benedetg, Grischun, Right: Praia das Catedrais, Galicia
Photography must not remain confined to the surface. If it aims to move us, it must offer a promise—and gesture beyond itself. Toward that which we feel before we think. Toward that which endures after the image has long since passed.
Left: Leis, Grischun, Right: Valle Verzasca, Ticino
The title Água e Pedra —water and stone— evokes both material and feeling. These elements appear throughout the work and speak to the two places that shaped this series: the atlantic shores of northern Portugal and the alps of Switzerland. Neither is my birthplace, yet both became places of living, of quiet belonging, both became some sort of home within. Both places urge me to feel.
Left: Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp, Bourgogne, Right: Valle Verzasca, Ticino
The world shown in this photographic essay is an intense, intimate and private world for the viewer alone. the viewer is animated to sense the pulse of reality.
Left: Val Stussavgia, Grischun, Right: Leis, Grischun
ÁGUA E PEDRA
The series Água e Pedra - Water and Stone - has been created continuously over the last few years on the Atlantic coasts of northern Portugal and in the Alps of Switzerland. Despite the obvious contrasts, a closer look reveals many similarities. The photographs on display emphasise the perception of the landscape with all the human senses. This gives rise to recurring themes such as surfaces, light and shadow, warmth, wind and time. It is an attempt to visualise multisensory phenomena. This opens up an individual approach for the viewer.
Left: Valle Verzasca, Ticino, Right: Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp, Bourgogne
Left: Apartamento Cedofeita, Porto, Right: Summer, Forest Zurich
Valle Verzasca, Ticino
LUKAS WALCHER
Lukas Walcher (*1994) studied architecture at TUM, at the FAUP in Porto and at the AdBK Munich. Lukas has been living and working in Zurich since January 2023 and has been a research assistant at the Chair of Design and Conception at the Technical University of Munich since April 2025. In addition to teaching, artistic architecture and landscape photography is part of his work. His focus is on spatial phenomena and analogue techniques.
A small part of the series is currently on view in Zurich as part of the group exhibition 4 Walls at the bookstore Never Stop Reading.
Instagram: walcher.l
website: lukaswalcher.eu
Photos by Lukas Walcher