Valletta 2018’s main conference has been moved from its planned venue at Muża because the new national arts museum is still not finished five months after its target date.
The international conference, entitled Sharing the Legacy, was scheduled to take place at Muża between October 24 and 26, but with the museum still a construction site, promotional material indicates the event has been quietly shifted to Fort St Elmo.
The €10 million museum, housed at the Auberge d’Italie in Valletta, is one of the European Capital of Culture flagship projects and was originally planned to open in May, displaying the fine art collection from the former national gallery in South Street, as well as new acquisitions.
It is still scheduled to host the annual conference of the Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO) between November 15 and 18.
Asked whether the museum would be open in time, Muża curator Sandro Debono said: “It has to be. I can say that the museum will be open before the end of the year, and I’m expecting the exact date to be announced soon.”
The event has been quietly shifted to Fort St Elmo
The Valletta 2018 Foundation did not respond to questions on the continued delays or when the museum was expected to open.
Last January, Valletta 2018 chairman Jason Micallef dismissed fears that the project would be delayed, insisting on Times Talk it would be open as scheduled by “May or, at the latest, the beginning of June”.
The foundation has never commented on the subsequent delays, but sources said in July that a number of discoveries made during construction – including that of the building’s original main staircase, thought to have been demolished – had forced redesigns or fresh clearance from Unesco due to the sensitivity of the historic building, slowing down the works.
At the time, however, there was still confidence the museum would be open in time for the Valletta 2018 conference this month.
Muża is not the first of the European Capital of Culture’s infrastructural projects to be hit by delays.
Works on the City Gate ditch embellishment project have also fallen behind, with no sign of the public garden planned to be opened for the start of events in January, and later delayed to July.
Other flagship projects have yet to see the light of day: the opening of the Valletta Design Cluster within the dilapidated Old Civil Abattoir (Il-Biċċerija), has been pushed back from this month to mid-2019, while the Malta International Contemporary Arts Space (MICAS) at the San Salvatore Bastion in Floriana will not be completed before 2021.