Sabbatical for Artistic Research Grant

The Sabbatical for Artistic Research Grant is one of Arts Council Malta’s tools to enable individuals to engage in artistic research which is practice-based or practice-led and aimed towards developing and exploring new ideas, methodologies, materials, and techniques towards further artistic development. This grant fulfils the Council’s Education and Development action (Strategy2025) to invest in research and creativity by introducing a sabbatical grant for artists and practitioners. Furthermore, the grant fulfils several strategic priorities outlined by the Council in the Strategy2025 document, namely:

• Nurturing creative potential and supporting development by encouraging creatives to engage in practice-based research and investigation;
• Investing in artistic excellence by encouraging levels of creative risk, experimentation, and active engagement of artists, as well as identifying talent and encouraging its development;
• Fostering artistic collaborations and partnerships for the development of the local artistic scene;
• Expanding opportunities for career pathways in the arts;
• Investing in twenty-first-century skills.

The grant forms part of Arts Council Malta’s funding schemes which aim to invest in exploratory projects that allow creative professionals to investigate aspects related to their artistic practice, explore and test their work, engage with new methods and technologies, conduct research, collaborate with creatives and relevant professionals, and develop their ideas further. Applications submitted may form part of the initial phase of a wider project/body of work or can be self-contained.

The objective of the scheme is to support research in the cultural and creative sectors, as per the National Cultural Policy 2021. As stated in the NCP 2021, artists working professionally in the sector may find it financially challenging to engage exclusively in artistic research for a significant period of time without compromising their income and financial commitments. The Council firmly believes in the importance of artistic research and the need for artists to renew and reflect on their practice. The initiative will support freelance creative practitioners who wish to take a sabbatical period of one year by providing an income and following agreed-upon outcomes and objectives.

The aims of the grant follow those of the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research to support the expansion of knowledge and understanding of artistic research.

Applicants may choose to focus on one or more of these areas within their projects:
Research into digital technologies and AI and how these inform contemporary artistic practices;
Experimenting with innovative methods of community-led artistic engagement.

The sabbatical year needs to be planned as a twelve month-long artistic research activity by applicants who are committed to: i. not engage themselves on work on a full-time basis elsewhere but ii. who may accept occasional/casual work (e.g. commissions/projects) on a part-time basis, thus leaving ample time and other resources to completing the tasks pertaining to the proposed sabbatical.

The sabbatical will include regular meetings with a mentor assigned by Arts Council Malta. At the end of the sabbatical period, the grant participants will have the opportunity to present their project and findings through an event aimed at sharing the insights that emerge from the artistic research.

Requirements in line with ongoing strategy

In line with its commitment to supporting the arts through its sustainable and accountable approach to public investment, ACM draws applicants’ attention to the following in line with its Strategy 2025:

Applicants are required to consider the principles expressed through its Right to Culture – Resource Pack when developing their proposal in relation to how they engage with communities and the considerations of everyone’s cultural rights in their work. The resource pack is aimed at increasing awareness regarding inclusivity and supporting the implementation of cultural rights in our day-to-day practice.

Applicants are also required to consider the Charter for the Status of the Artist when proposing their operational and programming activities to ensure acceptable and decent working conditions for artists and creative practitioners which embraces artistic freedom, accessibility, formal/informal/non-formal skill recognition, decent socio-economic conditions, non-discrimination and equity, ethical considerations and adherence to intellectual property rights and international labour law. The Charter for the Status of the Artist is meant to provide a dynamic frame of reference for any legislation, policy, or initiative which directly or indirectly impacts artists and cultural and creative sectors, ensuring that any action is aligned with the ultimate long-term vision of elevating the status of artists in Malta in line with their tangible value to society.

Who can apply?

The scheme may focus on creative and/or practice-based artistic research, led by a creative practitioner. This scheme also encourages community-based research projects.

The grant is open to creative practitioners/individual artists who are full-time self-employed.

Results

Application deadline: 21st October 2025 at noon

Rank Order

Beneficiary: Caroline Tonna

Reference number: SAR09-25-6998

Project Title: FASHION HERITAGE: FROM STORAGE TO DIGITAL REVIVAL

Amount awarded: €20,000

Fashion Heritage: From Storage to Digital Revival is an initial, practice-based research project that merges fashion heritage with emerging digital technologies as the first step towards a fully developed online fashion heritage platform. Conceived by dress historian and multidisciplinary artist Caroline Tonna, this initiative addresses the absence of a national fashion museum in Malta by digitally reviving fragile 18^th-20^th century garments from private collections. Through high-resolution photography, 3D scanning, scholarly research and collective memory, the project explores how innovative methods can transform hidden artefacts into engaging digital experience. At this initial stage, it serves as a prototype, testing methodologies that bridge academic research, technological innovation and artistic practice. The outcome will form the conceptual and visual foundation for a fully sustainable, open-access digital platform, ensuring that Malta’s fashion heritage is preserved, creatively reimagined, and shared with global audiences.

Beneficiary: Ira Melkonyan

Reference number: SAR25-25-7041

Project Title: Ta’ Ġewwa: Contemplations on Belonging

Amount awarded: €20,000

Ta’ Ġewwa: Contemplations on Belonging is a Sabbatical research by Ira Melkonyan, Artistic and Managing Co-Director of the rubberbodies collective, exploring themes of belonging and renewal. Drawing on her Ukrainian-Maltese heritage, the research examines how national identity and diasporic experiences influence creative practice within Malta’s multicultural art scene. Through three research avenues—voice exploration, scriptwriting, and pedagogical practice—Ira reflects on her artistic voice, merging feminist, performative, and ecological perspectives. In collaboration with musician Yasmin Kuymizakis, she will explore the singing voice as a metaphor for human fluidity and expression. Scriptwriting experiments will reinterpret Maltese Nativity plays through contemporary post-dramatic methods, while the lectures and workshops at the Valletta Design Cluster will foster dialogue across art, ecology, and philosophy. Returning to Gozo after a decade in Amsterdam, Ira aims to bridge Maltese and European networks, promote sustainability through archival reuse, and share her findings with the local makers.

Beneficiary: Lou Ghirlando

Reference number: SAR10-25-7003

Project Title: The Art of Becoming: Craft, Creativity, and Maturity in Dramatherapy Practice

Amount awarded: €20,000

Through this year-long, practice-based research project, Lou Ghirlando will explore how her artistic technique has matured within dramatherapy and how as a practitioner she can sustain her creativity and depth over time. Centred on the question “Who am I becoming as a practitioner?”, the project integrates personal dramatherapy, daily creative practice, literature review, and reflective dialogues with senior international dramatherapists. These insights will be applied and tested through minimal clinical practice with individual clients, and three community-based series of dramatherapy workshops with youths, adults, and psychiatric service users in Malta. In this way Lou will support refinement of her tools within the clinical context she regularly works – with clients recovering from eating disorders- as well as reaching out to new contexts.

The project will support Lou Ghirlando in deepening her practice, sharpening her tools and enhancing her professionalisation supported by reflection with international masters of dramatherapy. This resonates with the charter for the artist.

Dramatherapy is a process that integrates creative and dramatic tools to support a psychotherapeutic process. The healing is in the creativity and the relationship with the therapist. Thus the work of the therapist on herself that she brings herself to the therapy, as well as mastery of the creative tools she uses are of significant importance to the quality of her work. This in the end supports the people dramatherapists work with to grow in their self-awareness and acceptance, self-expression, emotional expression, creativity and imagination that support them in daily life, and building their sense of identity. This all through dramatic principles and understanding. Dramatherapy really is a place that embodies the right to culture.

Running from May 2026 to May 2027 the research aims to refine creative methodology, articulate the artistry that underpins robust therapeutic work, and strengthen Malta’s contribution to the international arts-in-health field. Findings will be shared through a public presentation in Malta and at an international conference in Italy in 2027.

Beneficiary: Elyse Tonna

Reference number: SAR19-25-7031

Project Title: More Than Content: Ecological Thinking as Method

Amount awarded: €20,000

More than Content: Ecological Thinking as Method explores how ecological thinking; rooted in interdependence, slowness and situated knowledge, can reshape curatorial methodology. Rather than treating ecology as a concept, the project approaches it as a mode of working that challenges dominant curatorial paradigms based on extraction, linearity and production. It invites instead practices shaped by porousness, care and more-than-human relations. Grounded in the specificities of the Mediterranean, the project investigates how curators think ecologically in response to lived conditions. Through site-based inquiry, discursive sessions and conversations with international practitioners, the research will produce a fragmentary, non-linear curatorial fieldbook composed of protocols, conceptual tools and fragments. By focusing on methodology rather than representation, the project contributes to a growing yet underdefined discourse on ecological curating. It asks: what does it mean to think and act curatorially in a time of cultural and climatic precarity?

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