THE SCHOOL OF WIND AND WAVES

Jimmy Grima has proven himself as a master of transcribing the intricacies of complex and sometimes unpalatable habits and hobbies of his birth country into stunning visual and performance art. In parallel to his practice with performance art pieces receiving great reviews and awards he is part of the team behind The School of Wind and Waves.

Malta to collect knowledge of the winds as part of the Valletta 2018 Cultural Programme. A tangible outcome of this research can be located within the limits of these four localities.

This led to the creation of this framework that makes space for the idea of listening, re-learning, and unlearning with teachers who are hardly found in any other school; within this framework, community members become such teachers.

of natural elements while referring to knowledge transfer.

JD: What fascinates you about the concept of ‘rewilding’ people?

JD: What is the School Of Wind and Waves?

JG: The School is a space for epistemic curiosity—a desire for knowledge, for learning new ideas while eliminating information gaps. Primarily the goal is to collect and create repositories while disseminating specific ecologies’ cultural and technological lore. At the School, we aim to be attentive to various individual and collective practices considered marginal about the mainstream culture and its discourse. Such practices offer unique forms of (often embodied) knowledge about the land, water, and ecosystems of particular locations while being inextricable from a specific place’s cultural traditions and memory.

The School of Winds and Waves is a newly established initiative I have thought about for a long time—after ilWarda tar-Rih (the Windrose Project). Around 2015 I led the rubberbodies collective and various collaborators and members of four communities in

This is the short version of how The School of Winds and Waves came to be. It must also have been some ghosts from the past project who have haunted me for the past decade with an obsession to transfer the things they knew. Some of these people have died since we interviewed them. One ghost would be that of Lino Psaila (19432017), kite master and author of a book in Maltese about heroes and tragedies of the micro-community of fishermen in Marsaxlokk “Il-Bahar Rasu Iebsa” (English title can be translated as “The Sea is Hardheaded”, which is a Maltese proverb).

JD: Where did the name come from?

JG: The name came about while musing with my collaborators. I appreciate that it holds both the intangible qualities

JG: At first, I did not know we were tapping into the idea of rewilding. What was essential was to document and find ways to disseminate marginal knowledge. We explicitly use the term “rewilding” for the online short guides because of their intersection with the topic. The idea to publish short but detailed accounts of how to trap animals has its roots in my ongoing collaboration with the bird trappers of Malta.

This micro-community is why I decided that a school, in the sense of re-learning or unlearning certain things about our environment, is essential.

Why? Because these people hold a knowledge that seldom finds space in books, their cultural, technological and sometimes artistic qualities are a critical aspect of culture and identity that needs to be recorded since the practices are on the verge of extinction. In the past, such knowledge was passed over from one generation to the other orally. However, today this way of knowledge transfer needs to be recovered since there is a lot of social mobility. In this sense, if you speak to a fisherman in his sixties today, there is a high possibility that his father was also a fisherman and his grandfather.

JOANNA DELIA is a medical doctor who specialises in cosmetic medicine. She is also a cultural consumer and art collector who tirelessly supports local contemporary art and culture.

However, simultaneously, there is a strong chance that his children are no longer fishermen. So the intergenerational orally transmitted lore is now in danger. Today, practices related to how we used to interact with nature have been gradually pushed out to accommodate a much more efficient way of doing things since the invention of the combustion engine to today’s revolution in robotics and automation. Most people have distanced themselves from the natural environment.

I also want to mention the preservationist view, conservationists, and people that engage with nature in a way that opposes them to such practices as birdtrapping. My position and invitation are to think beyond the dualistic divide while acknowledging the complexity of the current ecological catastrophe; I believe that marginal practices possess an essential value and must be viewed beyond the “barbarism-enlightenment” lens that is most definitely a remnant of colonial times. I welcome making space for complexity and pluralism to build a mutually respectful society.

When you look at Malta, such observations are more sharply visible. However, zooming out of Malta, since I have spent plenty of time in the Netherlands, other vital issues come into play. Here my attention turned towards the labour movement, the workforce and what knowledge these people hold regarding dealing with Water. How do those who have dedicated their lives to working with water relate to it? What are their sensitivities?

Technological development brought people in high-income economies to a comfortable standard of living, lives became efficient yet also somewhat sterile. And at the same, people grew distant to understanding of essential attributes that sustain life, such as the sourcing of food at large, the way we look and interact with nature; distantly – through binoculars or, even more radical, from the comfort of our living room through an LED screen.

I have a strong background in theatre, so I see another value in this knowledge. In theatre, we often speak about embodiment. I observed this when collaborating with the bird trappers or when I saw the fireworks masters at work; I noticed that the only way to “catch” their wisdom is to spend time with those who engage in these practices.

JD: Your work deals with several traditional practices which communities seem to be trying to root out - firework bomb building, hunting and trapping for pleasure, but also navigating the roots and social ramifications of these ‘delizzji’. Is The School an extension of these projects? Is it providing a less transient platform for the documentation of your research?

JG: The School focuses on nonmainstream practices. And yes, I am trying to organize and set up a community of contributors for posterity’s sake. The practices we are interested in are those relating to the passing of time, leisure and hobbies and, on the other hand, those relating to labour and skills. And as the name implies, practices that interact or relate to nature. There is something unique around the proximity towards nature and how deeply embedded this natural world is within these men (because it is usually always men).

Working closely with the traditional practices, as you named them in your questions, often reveals spaces or blindspots which are unique and essential for the culture. And we are in danger of losing access to this heritage altogether. I hold the post-war modernity and the neoliberal values of efficiency for the sake of economic values responsible for this imminent loss.

There is an ongoing resurfacing concept of pleasure, hobbies and the amateur. While exploring some of these practices, the traditional ones, more than any, have a vital element of noncommerciality. Of spending time doing what you love to do rather than having to do it because it’s professional duty. I found it very enriching to get to know this subject in more depth while reading “The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love” by Andy Merrifield. For example, non-professional experts have shaped societies in the past, such as rebuilding whole cities post-war; they often led cities, communities and inventions. If you look deeper into who was behind these revolutionary human efforts, you will not find professional urban planners commissioned by governments to rethink and gentrify city areas.

But ordinary people who, after work, met, united and came together to rebuild their societies. The school wants to look into all the practices which relate to this. However, the spirit is very much in line with searching for those doing it for the love of doing it. “L’amor propio”. In the case of the Maltese bird-trappers and their claim of loving nature and birds or how firework masters spend their time collectively rolling paper and filling it with gunpowder for months. All of the time spent is not paid for. It is voluntary. Such practice relating to the natural world with no capitalistic value seems to have dropped out of the canon and mainstream voices on ecology. The school sees these amateurs as masters and seeks to learn things from their attitude towards life.

On the other hand, we are also interested in the knowledge of labourers, the workers. For example, the stratum of