Launched in the hopeful chaos of the early ’90s, Malta Festival has always been more than a cultural event, becoming one of Europe’s most influential multidisciplinary festivals. Celebrating its 35th edition, Malta returned to the streets and skies of Poznań with a reaffirmed commitment to art as a collective experience.
For its 35th edition, Poznań pulsed with creativity over nine colourful days. Under the patronage of Dominika Kulczyk and Kulczyk Foundation, with over 30,000 attendees and 111 events – 42 theatrical performances, including 4 premieres, and 16 free outdoor spectacles, it was a festival defined by openness, diversity, and a vibrant energy. Hot summer days of late June blurred the lines between past and future, spectacle and intimacy, making Poznań the place to be.
A living stage
This year, once again, the city became more than a backdrop, turning into a vibrant stage. Open-air performances transformed public spaces into stages, blending seamlessly into daily city life, engaging residents and visitors alike.
The grand opening at Plac Wolności (Solidarity Square) quite literally lifted eyes to the sky. Above the audience’s heads, stretched across the whole square – a 200-metre-long tightrope with Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga from the French collective Basinga balancing on it without a harness. “We try to develop, expand, transmit, and communicate this art [of tightrope walking], which, better than any other, reveals how our greatness is based on our weaknesses and our ability to combine them”, says the collective. “What connects us strengthens us” – an ethos that echoed throughout the festival’s embrace of collectiveness.
From live music to a trip to the past in Once Upon a Time in Glutendorf, which introduced the history of Poznań’s early 20th-century people’s theatre with a play taking place inside a vintage Jelcz bus, the open programme offered something for everyone. While at the Old Market Square, Cie Gratte Ciel, a French aerial theatre company, invited the audience into a captivating, poetic exploration of humanity’s connection with nature. RoZéO was a hauntingly beautiful, wordless performance where suspended artists swayed like priestesses or amazons above the square. Accompanied by music fusing electronic and natural sounds, it was an immersive meditation on humanity’s bond with nature.
For Love
Coinciding with the Poznań Pride, the festival’s mission statement “za miłość” (“for love”) resonated even more deeply. An Intimate Evening with Alaska Thunderfuck was the only European performance of the RuPaul’s Drag Race star this year. Featuring music, burlesque, sharp humour, storytelling, and live piano accompaniment, the show was as emotionally engaging, with some songs chosen by the audience, creating a personal connection, as naturally energetic, provocative, and simply fun.
Speaking about selecting “songs that move us, inspire us, or ones we want to share with you”, underscoring how shared emotions were a key part of the evening, she proved her blend of camp and political depth was very much present. Campy and flamboyant yet thought-provoking, with queer politics at the core, reminding everyone how vital the role of drag performances in the current political climate is.
A Costume as a Manifesto
However, one of the most powerful and singular events was Embodying Pasolini, a one-of-a-kind performance staged only once a year in a carefully chosen location. Conceived and performed by Tilda Swinton and art historian Olivier Saillard, this intimate, ritual-like tribute reawakened the emotional and political power of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s vision, 50 years after his death.
Original costumes and props from Pasolini’s films were handled with reverent minimalism, brought back to life through Swinton’s androgynous presence—a living canvas for nearly 30 garments. Designed by Danilo Donati during the 1960s and 1970s, crafted by the atelier Farani for the films, the costumes were an exciting exploration for those familiar with Pasolini’s filmography and those only now ready to meet him, thanks to the clothes that are works of art themselves. From the biblical costume of Herod in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), resembling El Greco’s paintings, and unforgettable, soft pink lamé tunic with a golden cord worn by Gemmata in The Decameron (1971), to sweeping Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). The performance was like a moving exhibition, with the scene setup resembling a runway, a peculiar approach to the topic – somewhere between archaeology, archivism, and even autopsy. At one point, a costume lay tagged and covered on a table like a body: studied, preserved, honoured.
It isn’t the first collaboration between Swinton and Saillard. One of them was The Impossible Wardrobe performance at Palais de Tokyo in 2012. There, Swinton and Saillard acted as guardians of fashion history, presenting rare garments from the Musée Galliera outside their usual museum confines. Swinton moved down the runway, physically engaging with each piece, treating them as living relics. She lifted, smelled, hugged, and danced with the clothing, inviting the audience to see them not as static exhibits, but as vessels of memory and presence. With Saillard having been coming up with shows like this since 2005, seeking to make a comment on fashion with a powerful performance, Embodying Pasolini resembles The Impossible Wardrobe in format, making an everlasting impression.
“I asked Tilda to be the pedestal of each garment”, said Saillard around the 2012 performance. “I asked her to incarnate the clothing, but not in every instance”. The current show gives this approach even deeper meaning as Pasolini himself never tended to tell the actors what to do – “I never chose an actor as an interpreter. I always chose an actor for what he is”. Although he said so mostly about casting non-actors, as the director often expressed his reluctance in working with professionals (“The principal difference is that the actor has an art of his own. He has his own way of expressing himself, his own technique which seeks to add itself to mine”), Swinton – despite being a master of her craft, managed to become almost one with her subject. She’s not an interpreter – her role is the absence of any role but revealing a costume after a costume with an almost accidental yet deliberate capacity to stir emotions with movements and facial expressions, walking us hand in hand through the embrace and appreciation for the art.
Pasolini saw poetry – including cinema – as a life-affirming force, reconnecting us with fundamental truths. As such, costumes in his films played a deeply symbolic, thematic, and political role, far beyond simple decoration or historical realism, used to evoke both myths and timelessness. Alive with texture, colour, and dirt, Pasolini’s elaborate costuming was to celebrate diversity, folklore, and the visual richness of peripheral societies as a kind of ideological counterpoint to capitalist modernity.
Although, then, in Salò, the opposite is true with the fascist elites wearing rigid, pristine uniforms or bourgeois attire, contrasting grotesquely with the brutal, dehumanising acts they commit. Costumes from this film were presented in Embodying Pasolini with Chopin’s “Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2” played on a loop in the background to highlight even further the unfortunate timelessness of the depravity shown in Pasolini’s last film.
Vilified in his life till the death, which many believe to be a politically motivated assassination, Pasolini has since become a global icon of anti-globalisation and radical art, with his works resonating in today’s political and cultural debates even more deeply than before. And the costumes in his films were never just costumes but semiotic tools, used to create a cinema that challenges, provokes, and re-sacralizes the visual image. Swinton and Saillard managed to hypnotise the audience with exactly that – embodying the meaning behind the garments.
Landscapes of Imagination
Meanwhile, ULTRAFICCIÓN No. 1 / Odłamki czasu by El Conde de Torrefiel was one of the boldest open-air works at this year’s festival. Performed at the clearing by Lake Malta, just as day was fading into night, an immersive journey weaving rhythmic soundscapes and evocative voices into a meditative experience unfolded. A word-and-sound ensemble piece with no traditional stage or visuals but with theatrical sheep wandering among the audience, the performance dissolved the boundary between performers and viewers, reality and fiction.
Dewey’s Dell’s The Rite of Spring presented a bold fusion of contemporary dance, ballet, and mime, with bodies writhing, spinning, crawling – powerful and uncanny at times. In cave-like darkness inhabited by back-spinning spiders, silkworms, mantis-hunters, psychedelic flowers, and more, Rite didn’t just reinterpret Stravinsky’s ballet but redefined it for the 21st century – a broader meditation on the life and death cycle and humanity’s ecological impact. With a fantastical visual feast, costumes and sets used to create uncanny lifeforms, the result leaves both a mesmerising and eerie expression that would stay with the viewers for a while.
These performances can be recognised as standing as an expression of Malta Festival’s radical openness, blending ritual, ecology, and storytelling into a communal twilight ritual. It’s not just seen or heard – it’s lived.
As such, Malta Festival has never stopped reinventing itself. This year’s edition—spanning immersive theatre, boundary-pushing fashion, radical opera, and dance—celebrated that legacy by rethinking tradition itself. And through it all, the spirit of Malta—art as democratic encounter—beat louder than ever. Thirty-five years on, it remains a festival rooted in courage and everlasting impression.
