In his new publication, Cervantes: 400 Years of Visual Silence, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci unpacks a bold debate on the visual artistic relationship between Malta and Spain, specifically on the connections, or apparent lack thereof, to Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. In the author's own words, "it seems that Malta succeeded in deleting all the Cervantian windmills from collective memory and plunged Sancho into an unreachable selva oscura."
This visual silence, as Schembri Bonaci infers, is ideologically engineered. Consequently, memory becomes the greatest victim: collective memory succumbs to a manufactured narrative. 

The study of Maltese Modern art in relation to Cervantes and the twentieth-century context brings forth a question rarely, if ever, asked: Did Malta ever recognise Quixotic windmills as monsters? Schembri Bonaci argues that the people of Malta did so in the early twentieth century, and quite literally so, as the "people saw the windmill as their reference point of oppression" and reacted against actual windmills on the 7th of June 1919.
He delves into further events and instances wherein Don Quixote played a role in the evolution of Maltese art and history. Furthermore, the author presents a number of conceptual categories for the analysis of art and its relationship with memory evolution.
Cervantes: 400 Years of Visual Silence is the first publication to form part of the Changing Gear research project which focuses on the Modern and Contemporary art of the Mediterranean region.
The book has been published by Horizons in 2022 and includes an introduction by Nikki Petroni.