Nigel Baldacchino, Promise Litter
ENG⭢ FR
At the invitation of Sangyon Joo, director of the DATZ Museum of Art and DATZ Press (Seoul), photographer Nigel Baldacchino and curator Anne Immelé completed a one-month residency at the DATZ Museum of Art. This residency led to the production of the exhibition Promise Litter 숨겨진 잔해, created in partnership with the BPM-Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse and Arts Council Malta.
DATZ MUSEUM OF ART / South Korea
FRAME exhibition space
September 13 - December 28 2025
Curated by Anne Immelé
Promise Litter 숨겨진 잔해 is a photographic installation that explores sparks of off-kilter energy embroidered in the nature of the photographer’s own world, indiscriminately across vegetation and urban fabric alike. The series reflects on the cardinal regenerative and degenerative forces at play in nature being synonymous, lending them the same impartial eye. The photographs have their footing in the fringes of the observable, bubbling with a chaotic energy of fertility, germination, decay, stillness, calm, movement, scatter. With a felt emphasis on photographs looking downwards, Promise Litter 숨겨진 잔해 seems to suggest buried lines connecting distant forms of life, accenting the physical ground beneath as if to feel its pulse.
Nigel Baldacchino is an artist and designer based in Malta (EU) whose practice spans photography, sound, text, and spatial design. With Anne Immelé and Bénédicte Blondeau, he co-founded the photography-centred itinerant exhibition project those eyes - these eyes - they fade, which exhibits photographers whose work tends to highlight the looking over the looked-at, and is often driven by personal reflections on witnessing and relating to one’s immediate & extended surroundings. Baldacchino also forms part of the team behind the Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse serving both as exhibition designer, curator and planner. After taking care of the exhibition & lighting design of the main pavilion at the first edition of the MaltaBiennale featuring more than 70 artists, Baldacchino co-founded DAMS together with Brian J. Farrugia - a design and manufacturing company specialising in custom furniture, fitouts & exhibition design. Publications of his work include the found-image & own-poetry collection Soon Out of Context (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and the album Everything is Still Here (Complex Holiday, 2021). His photography has been exhibited in numerous collective shows internationally, and in 2023 he attended the Long Term Photobook program by Penumbra Foundation & Image Threads.
Anne Immelé is a French photographer and curator whose work explores the connections between memory, territory, and hospitality. In her recent series Melita, Refuge, she weaves a visual narrative between the ancient Phoenician routes and contemporary migratory trajectories across the Mediterranean. Her images, both poetic and politically engaged, question notions of refuge and displacement. Since 2013, she has been directing the Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse (BPM), a festival she co‑founded. Since completing her PhD on photo sequencing, she has been teaching photography at HEAR (Haute école des arts du Rhin) in France. For this edition of the FRAME exhibition, she participates as the curator on behalf of the Biennale de la Photographie de Mulhouse (BPM), furthering her exploration of associative dialogue in photographic presentation, as well as the idea of exhibition as a space of encounter.
Nigel Baldacchino, Promise Litter
Nigel Baldacchino's statement :
In his story Quaestio de Centauris first published under a pseudonym in 1966 alongside a series of short fiction entitled Natural Histories, author Primo Levi describes a reality whose origins are rooted in "a time, never to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity, in which the entire universe felt love, so intensely that it nearly returned to chaos" and how some surviving species are still tethered to its latent residue.
The word ‘litter’ points towards a poignant set of meanings in the English language, containing regenerative and degenerative energies under one term:
1 i. a covered and curtained couch provided with shafts and used for carrying a single passenger
ii. a device (such as a stretcher) for carrying a sick or injured person
2 i. material used as bedding for animals
ii. material used to absorb the urine and feces of animals
iii. the uppermost slightly decayed layer of organic matter on the forest floor
3 i. the offspring at one birth of a multiparous animal
4 i. trash, wastepaper, or garbage lying scattered about
ii. an untidy accumulation of objects
- Litter (definition *Merriam-Webster dictionary)
Promise Litter draws sparingly from this confluence of references, mapping onto them the photographer's felt experience.
Nigel Baldacchino, Promise Litter
Datz Museum of Art opened in October of 2010 in Jinsaegol, Gwangju, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, with a mission to help rejuvenate artistically creative spirits. It presents an organic space in nature where one can spend self-reflective time away from the busy city. It is the museum's hope that those who visit will encounter true beauty and reclaim their personal imaginations, sensibilities, and perspectives to breathe anew fresh life into their daily lives. Datz Museum wishes for a community in which life is shared through art.
FRAME exhibition space, Datz Museum of Art