On 13 November, the Mdina Biennale will open its doors to the public, presenting a unique selection of both international and national artists. Some of the participating artists will experience Malta for the very first time, others will revisit the island to develop further a dialogue between their research and the geographical and cultural context.

This is particularly the case with Silvia Camporesi, who exhibited at Saint James Cavalier Centre for Creativity some years ago.

In her solo exhibition the artist presented a series of works called The Island (developed during her stay in Malta and Gozo) and a video trilogy (Dance, Dance, Dance; Second Wind; Sifr) in which the artist investigated spirituality and the power of the soul.

Her participation in the Mdina Biennale, with the theme "Christianity, Spirituality and the Other", can therefore be interpreted as a natural extension of her previous research. And it is the continuity between the theme of the Mdina Biennale and Camporesi's research on which I would like to focus my attention.

I think we can understand the reason why Camporesi's work is so meaningful to us by analysing her latest project, the photographic book Atlas Italiae which is neither a Journey in Italy nor a scientific mapping of the abandoned sites found in the country.

Far from being structured as a travel journal and avoiding any stereotype about sunny, happy Mediterranean countries, Camporesi shows us a reflection on the ruin, the buried memory of the places that she portrays.

By reflecting on the past that we decided to ignore, the abandoned buildings and villages, we can reinterpret our history, or as better said by Walter Benjamin, we can "articulate the past historically". And if we want to interpret this past, we have to act so that the past will not became a "tool of the ruling classes".

We have to be vigilant and we have to defend our past from the conformism which is threatening it. More particularly, the conformism which threatens the abandoned places portrayed by Silvia Camporesi is the same that has determined their decline: the yearning for something technologically new.

A compulsion for the new that is not only visible in Italy, but that is also deeply engendered by Malta's building industry. It is no secret that we are exposed to new construction sites on a daily basis: our eyes are progressively losing "pieces of sky", as in the case of Sliema where the sun falls behind the buildings, subsequently creating an early unnatural shadow in the afternoon. And while we are building new spaces, we let the old ones fall apart (as in the case of the Valletta Market, Gzira's theatre, etc), in order to dismiss them once they no longer represent a living memory.

The abandoned places are fragile, not only from an architectural point of view; they are also fragile memories of what our country was. The fragility of those places, which is the subject matter of Camporesi's work, is fully mirrored in her technique: the artist, in fact, prints her pictures in black and white and she then colours them. By adopting this hand colouring technique, Camporesi recreates on the surface the colour she remembers, and she is also dedicating her time and attention to something that was abandoned by society, something that we decided to ignore, or worse, something that was removed from our historical memory.

In her pictures we can trace a certain continuity with the concept of the ruin as expressed in the Romantic age; a continuity that nourishes what Marinella Paderni (an Italian critic who will deliver a public talk during the Mdina Biennale) efficaciously describes as "poetry and metaphysics of the sublime". A sublime that is expressed in two ways; the 'return of the repressed' represented by the subjects themselves, the old insane asylums and prisons but also old factories and abandoned places) and the fascination with the obsolete objects which inhabit that space.

The first category, the return of the repressed, is something that is very close to the Maltese contemporary debate. I think the decision of converting the dockyards into an academic space can be a constructive way of dealing with our history, and more particularly with what we decided to remove.

The abandoned dockyards, a memory of Malta's colonial past, but also evidence of a technological and industrial past, were abandoned for too long. By refusing to deal with that past and ignoring what they symbolise, we were also negating the memory of that past. If we let conformism win by ignoring the past, we risk having another urban space dedicated to restaurants and urban speculation.

On the contrary, only by dealing with their meaning, their history, can we dedicate those buildings (which represent the climax of our industrial past) to the new awakening of knowledge. We can therefore respect those places by keeping them alive daily, re-appropriating a space by creating a cultural and living debate around them.

This is something which is close to what Dr. Schembri Bonaci is also attempting to challenge in Malta, both with the Mdina Biennale and his role as the artistic director of Strada Stretta. It is particularly in Strada Stretta (Strait Street) that this philosophy is becoming more and more explicit. With its calendar of cultural events, Strada Stretta is becoming a place in which people can meet, giving life to the memory and to the past of the street. A past that cannot be obliterated, but a past celebrated by the events and the music that can be heard across the street. By doing so the street can experience a rebirth, but a rebirth that is totally aware of its past.

Following similar criteria, the Mdina Biennale will populate the Silent City in an attempt to promote a new way of experiencing the town and avoiding that which can be defined as the "Disneyland effect", something that has already destroyed Italian cities such as Venice (which has become a tourist circus, losing the memory and function of historical buildings in order to convert them into touristic corners and souvenir shops).

Venice was also central to Camporesi's work in her photographic book La Terza Venezia, in which the artist reflects on the fake representation of certain postcard views.

By populating Mdina and by bringing back the multicultural character of the city, the Mdina Biennale will investigate the past of the town, while avoiding any notion of rhetorical superfluity. On the contrary, the exhibiting artists will be asked to establish a dialogue between their research and the historical tradition of the city to negate any conformism with today's age of forgetfulness.

Irene Biolchini (MPhil) is a doctoral student in the History of Art Department, University of Malta. Her book, 'Le faenze di Lucio Fontana' was recently published by the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza with the collaboration of the History of Art Department. She is part of the organisational team of the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale which will be held between 13 November 2015 and 7 January 2016. APS Bank is the main partner of the Mdina Biennale.