Hoarding Culture
Slogans, renders and promises, at hoarding scale.
Street art has its galleries; Malta has its hoardings, and they line every project on the islands with a riot of colour, ambition and improbable promise.
The site hoarding is a uniquely honest art form, in that it is dishonest at the largest possible scale. Here, in vinyl two metres tall, is the future as the brochure sees it: an impossibly blue sky, lawns of a green not found in nature, slender residents sipping something pale on a balcony, and not a single crane, skip or queue in sight. “A new way of living,” it announces, over a render of the building that replaced the old way of living.
Learn to read the form. The stock-photo couple who appear on hoardings across the entire island, living their best lives outside every development at once. The artist’s impression carefully cropped to exclude the neighbours. The launch date, optimistic; the phrase “coming soon,” eternal.
Best appreciated as a walking tour. Stroll from hoarding to hoarding and assemble, panel by panel, a portrait of a Malta that exists only in elevation. It is magnetic, genuinely: a gallery with no closing time and no entry fee.
One must experience it. Just don’t expect the finished building to match the wall.
