“Get 3,000 young people with money, give them cheap alcohol and very sexy girls and don’t tell me this thing should not explode. Every night, it doesn’t.”

David Pisani is talking to me in a Paceville lounge on a Saturday afternoon. Some music is already pumping, not loud enough to interfere with our conversation. People are having an afternoon bite or a couple of drinks, but the mood is subdued.

Pisani is talking to me about Night and Day, a book made in collaboration with his wife, urban anthropologist Elise Billiard, which looks at the two faces of the small strip of land that is Malta’s entertainment Mecca.

This is not the couple’s first collaboration of the sort: before this they worked on Transit, a similar publication which looked at the urban implications of the City Gate project.

“People weren’t discussing it, no one was taking into account the people and their relation to the place.”

Their interest in Paceville was piqued when the couple spent 18 months living in St Julian’s in- between houses.

“We used to come to Paceville to post letters, and we started noticing that Paceville is a very strange place. It’s almost like a village, but no one thinks of Paceville as a place where there are gardens and trees, and in which people live.

“We speak of residents, but there wasn’t enough understanding of when the residents came, how long they’ve been here, and so on. So we decided to do this project,” Pisani says.

“Paceville is a very interesting place from an urban point of view. It changes drastically from night to day and it manages to transform well. Somehow there is cohabitation between night and day.”

Night and Day cohabit in the book, for which Pisani took the night shots and Billiard took the day shots. The approaches are night and day, too: while the day shots were taken on medium-format film (Pisani’s generally preferred medium), the night shots were taken on a compact digital camera, which drew less attention towards him.

You see at least 50 nationalities cohabiting and it seems to work

“We’re not used to seeing Paceville by day,” he says. “The night is more obvious; the girls, the posters, the clubs, the drunks ... But it wasn’t easy. I think I would have preferred to do the day, because as an urban space it’s very interesting.”

The nights, he continues, apart from presenting technical difficulties because of the low light, were not as interesting as he had hoped they would be.

“I thought I’d come here and find lots of people drunk and the accompanying confusion, stay on until three in the morning and I’d be done in a week. In fact, in 18 months I really had to work hard to find those situations. It’s been over-inflated. You have to compare Paceville with similar places abroad, and that’s when you realise how safe it is,” he reports.

“There are the odd fights here and there, but it fizzles out very quickly. Occasionally, there’s something serious – but that should really happen on a daily basis, when in fact it doesn’t.”

Paceville is a minefield of stories, opinions and emotions, and Pisani and Billiard were careful where to tread. “We were not out to create controversy over drugs or prostitutes or whatever,” the photographer says. The project has also avoided the infamous gentlemen’s clubs that have mushroomed all over town, a can of worms that has not been opened on this occasion.

“We’re not doing journalism, it’s actually an urban art project,” Pisani insists. Instead of looking at the controversy, the project seems to document what Pisani considers to be a very “interesting urban experiment”.

Then he drops the bomb: “My prediction is that in five years’ time, Paceville will be gone. Lots of money is moving in now. Hugo has taken over a big part of St Rita steps and now we’re going from English breakfasts to sushi – it’s all trendy and upmarket.

“The Paceville I knew has changed. It’s going to change completely and people are going to leave. The question is where the next Paceville is going to be for revellers,” Pisani says.

But apart from what he claims is the gentrification of the place, Pisani and Billiard see it as a pos-sible prototype for Maltese society in the future.

“For us, Paceville is a good experiment of what Malta might be like in 50 years’ time, where they’d be pockets of nightlife in villages and you’ll notice that in parts of Malta it might be happening.” He also points at the multiculturalism already present in daytime.

“You could say Paceville is ahead of the rest of the country in integrating foreigners. The clubs are a different story. During the day you see at least 50 nationalities cohabiting and it seems to work.”

The book opens with an essay detailing 24 hours in Paceville – based on real events. There is an interesting ‘in-between’ time which goes from the early afternoon to around nine in the evening. “It’s a very strange time, and we describe that a little.” After that, however, it’s Paceville as we know it and, thanks to the marvels of ethanol, don’t quite remember.

“Many Maltese people come here as a release valve. They come here to vomit, then go back home. But you need a place to throw up.”

Night and Day is published by EDE Books.

www.edebooks.eu