Mothertongues (2024) and Hlas (2018)

Mothertongues is an archive installation by Anna Calleja that draws from her family and personal belongings to trace stories of matriarchal heritage across three generations. The work was exhibited at the inaugural Malta Biennale, curated by Sofia Baldi Pighi, and installed at the Grandmasters Palace, a site long associated with male authority and colonial power. Within this charged setting, Calleja introduced a feminist counter-narrative, foregrounding the conflicts between faith, shame, desire, and memory – how these tensions shaped identity across three generations of Maltese women. Two tables displayed archival photographs, pamphlets, journals, cyanotypes, drawings, and paintings woven into a collective dialogue. The project began with a box belonging to Calleja’s paternal grandmother, filled with passports that charted the shifting political identity of Malta across her lifetime: from a subject of the British Empire, to a citizen of an independent Malta under the Queen of Malta, through the Republic, and later the European Union. This compressed history of colonial transition, all contained within a single life, became the starting point for investigating the family archive. From there, Calleja turned to correspondence from her great-aunt, who entered a convent in the USA in the 1930s, revealing how Catholicism and language shaped her worldview. These discoveries prompted a wider excavation of memory and material, unpicking the traces of how identity is inscribed across generations. Her maternal grandmother’s archive offered another perspective: school report cards that excluded Maltese from the curriculum, geography exams that focused on Britain but omitted Malta, and private devotional collections of female archetypes such as Santa Rita, the Queen, Lady Diana, and Juliet. These fragments reveal how colonial hierarchies, religion, and cultural expectations shaped education, gender roles, and self-perception. Her mother’s archive revealed both intimacy and restriction: how an archetypal story of love and marriage, though freely chosen, came at the cost of financial freedom – a businesswoman in 1989 still requiring her husband’s signature to buy a washing machine. Love letters exchanged with her fiancé sit beside the Equal Rights in Marriage white paper she helped campaign for, and newspaper articles from Moviment Mara Maltija, where she fought for equal rights in marriage. Revisiting this material sparked renewed connections with former members, who began digitising their own feminist radio archives, extending the project into an ongoing act of shared remembrance. A doll from Gozo, given to her as a child, speaks of girlhood within wider currents of geopolitics. The archive also held her handmade baby blanket, crocheted by her grandmother, an heirloom that resonates against Calleja’s own shop-bought Harrods blanket – a quiet marker of anglicisation, social mobility, and the shift away from handmade textiles in Malta and Gozo within one generation. Together, these objects trace the ways love, domestic life, and activism became entangled in the struggle between dependence and autonomy. Calleja’s own archive reflects the globalisation of Malta, where Minnie Mouse spoons and an iPod nano sit beside Catholic relics such as a small wooden Virgin Mary icon and Dutrina pamphlets. Secret teenage diaries reveal the dual pull of sexual curiosity and shame, charting the complexities of growing up queer in a conservative Catholic society. Tokens of political struggle also appear: a pro-choice badge, a pregnancy test, and packaging from the morning-after pill, illegal in Malta during her teenage years, with abortion still criminalised today. These fragments testify to the cultural shifts, contradictions, and negotiations around autonomy in her generation. Alongside these materials, Calleja presented Hlas, a hanging tapestry of sewn, silkscreened images of home printed on found fabrics. Created while living in the UK, the piece sits between the personal and political, the painterly and sculptural, a threshold between belonging and departure. By assembling these intergenerational archives into one installation, Calleja assumed the role of “ruler of the archive,” deciding what to preserve and what to withhold. Each woman carries a different surname, as each generation took the name of their father; in this installation, the matriarchal lineage is highlighted, tracing the language and archetypes of women and girlhood. Mothertongues becomes an excavation of Maltese identity; acknowledging how faith, authority, memory, and desire both sustain and constrain women, and how identity continues to be negotiated across generations. Media: archival material, painting, cyanotype, drawing, silkscreen-printed found fabric, thread