It’s alright to destroy places. Unless you’re the wrong sort of person, that is, namely a foreigner. In that case, the Maltese, who strongly believe that their country is theirs and theirs alone to destroy, get all patriotic and territorial.

Take one Nathan Bowen, a street artist who came all the way from London to spray-paint a garish yellow clown on a rock face in Xlendi. The humour was quite lost on most. The story made the headlines, hundreds wrote furious online comments detailing which parts of his body Bowen should be made to clean up with, and the police are said to be on a manhunt the likes of which we haven’t seen since Ċikku Fenech’s excursion in 1963.

I’m not Bowen’s lawyer. Still, I think there’s a compelling case to be made for a simple misunderstanding. The rock face in question is a few metres away from a street. There are buildings on the other side, and it is feasible to suppose that Bowen took the rocks to be standard roadside fare. In other words, that he never wilfully took up landscape painting, but stuck to what he thought was street art all along.

Which brings me to Jason Micallef, the chair of the Valletta 2018 Foundation. Last Monday, Micallef held a press conference at the Upper Barrakka at which he said that the oil rig moored at the Palumbo shipyard was an eyesore. It was “ruining the aesthetic of the harbour”, by which he meant the view across the harbour from Valletta.

This is not about Micallef. He was right to point out the value of what Germans call the Stadtbild – the skyline of a city and the bird’s-eye view of it as observed from high vantage points. The location of the press conference was well-chosen, too, since the terrace at the Upper Barrakka is possibly the most visited urban vantage point in Malta (the Mdina bastion being a close runner-up.)

Whether or not the rig is indeed an eyesore is a moot point. I suppose some will see a certain industrial beauty in it. It is not unlike an unravelled Tour Eiffel, and from a certain angle it looks like something Anish Kapoor might come up with.

The so-called Smart City squats on the skyline and gives the giant finger to viewers at the Upper Barrakka

Others might argue that the whole point of Valletta 2018 is to celebrate the diversity of the city. And, while it isn’t exactly quaint postcard fodder, the working industrial heritage of the harbour is a key part of that diversity. Certainly it rescues the harbour from the unbearable monotony of a formulaic gentrification.

Be that as it may, it is not my intention here to agree or disagree with Micallef. What bothers me is his selective attention to parts of the harbour view. In fairness, he is by no means alone in his partial blindness.

Looking across from the Upper Barrakka, the thing that really spoils the picture is not to the right, but rather to the left, of the viewer. It is by far bigger than the oil rig at the shipyard. Unlike the rig, it is permanent and can’t be towed out when the job’s done. Also unlike the rig, it is not rooted in the industrial heritage of the harbour. It is, in fact, not found in the harbour at all.

The so-called Smart City squats on the skyline and gives the giant finger to viewers at the Upper Barrakka. It looks like a piece of Dubai that floated off and came to rest in the unlikeliest of places, right on top of the 17th-century Fort Ricasoli. It’s an ugly, pointless monument to empty political promises and speculative land-grabbing. It’s also getting bigger and bigger, though apparently unnoticed by Micallef.

Also apparently unnoticed is Xlendi minus the few square metres of rock painted by Bowen. Like Smart City, it too is a cathedral complex to speculative real estate. The destruction in Xlendi started in the late 1970s and shows no signs of slowing down.

By ‘destruction’, I don’t mean the act of building itself. Rather, I mean the hideous stuff that was put up with absolutely not the slightest thought for the topography of the place. The only reason why Xlendi is still tolerable (just about) is that it was so astonishingly beautiful to start off with.

Still, I see no outrage in the papers. If Valletta 2018 were Xlendi 2018, Micallef would no doubt call a press conference about a yellow clown.

I too hated the Xlendi clown when I first saw it. Except the more I think about it, the more it grows on me. Bowen is the kind of tourist I like. He did not travel 1,500 miles to get drunk on Cisk, or to buy a set of ‘I love Gozo’ tea towels. Instead, he found one of the last remaining spots of unspoilt rock and painted a mural of the one and true protagonist of the butchered landscape.

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