“MICAS belongs to the fortifications,” architect Konrad Buhagiar, the curator of Beyond the Bastions, says of the restoration project and contemporary intervention that today has regaled the San Salvatore bastion with the Malta International Contemporary Art Space.

As a restoration architect, Buhagiar delights in the knowledge that to cast one’s eye on an abandoned place – as these bastions were only until recently – offers a magical quality, of understanding what can be created out of the restoration, or paradoxically the destruction of a place.

As in the excavation of the ancient rock, its destruction ultimately leads to a future, or a new building, a paradox for which Buhagiar invokes Jacques Derrida’s metaphor of the quarry. “The rock extracted out of a place also enriches that place, as has happened in the creation of Malta’s military topography. ‘Quarry’, in French carrière, and therefore ‘career’, embodies the destruction of something to then give it a future, a career… it’s the paradox of extracting from a place to create what Derrida calls a ‘gift’.”

As a defensive quarry, the Floriana Lines were therefore a gift in themselves, but with a completely different mission. “The bastions and ditches were built to buy time for the defenders to prevent the enemy from reaching the city. You can see it everywhere in the ramparts, in the ditches and the hollow spaces. So the landscape once engineered to manage attack and also retreats – especially the Ritirata as its very title explains – now invites a new type of wandering through a museum.”

With MICAS’s galleries embedded in the 17th century bastions designed by Maurizio Valperga, the defensive logic of the rock is neither erased but nor is it glorified, to instead become part of an ongoing dialogue between new and old. Visitors descend through galleries suspended within the historic ditches, passing raw rock, strata and contemporary forms – a restoration that is not nostalgic, but which produces a tension between heritage and future, allowing the museum to leave its trace and enrich the future.

“The fortifications encode geological and historical time, not as a neutral sequence but, as Gilles Deleuze argued, a superimposition of present and past – a durée,” Buhagiar says, citing the philosopher’s analysis of the crystal-image as a portrait of duration, where time is not linear, but where the past exists concurrently with the present and each point in the future splits into a present that passes, and a past that influences and determines the present: a superimposition.

Hodology, a term developed from travellers’ narratives where exotic encounters delivered transformational experiences, is also applied to the visitor’s experience at MICAS. “The idea of hodology within a museum is that the museum transforms the visitor, in a way. To experience MICAS is to experience what Jean-Paul Sartre described as hodological space, a web of possible paths structured not by maps, but by movement, choice, and effect. In this sense, MICAS is not just a building – it is a journey, not viewed from above like a masterplan, but lived through step by step, breath by breath. Each visitor charts a different trajectory. As Sartre says, emotion transforms the world, charging the space with possibility, the body transformed by that space.”

In this way, MICAS does not get experienced all at once. The terraced galleries open sequentially, the ceiling hovers, the shadow shift through the changing natural light. “The museum is something that helps us become different people. It is not just something we view and which leaves us neutral and unaffected. And MICAS does not offer closure. It resists finality of monument, and it reveals a strange economy of time, where architecture gives of itself while never being spent… a bit like the quarry.”

And as a gift, it accepts that nothing is settled once and for all. “The military past is not erased, but made available for critical memory. The fortification becomes a stage. The path becomes philosophy,” Buhagiar says, adding the unmistakable quote attributed to Julius Caesar as he crossed the Rubicon. “Alea iacta est… the die is cast, the step has been made, the decisions taken, and the museum is here. The rest is yet to be seen in the future.”

As a combination of architecture and artistic curation, the past is therefore experienced through different ways, even though MICAS somewhat disrupts the heritage on site by appropriating the space rather than just displaying it.

MICAS’s art historian and exhibition manager Guillaume Dreyfuss says the restored space today offers different temporalities, from its geology to its military and colonial appropriation, the function of care that was once the Ospizio, the institution today and the creativity it presents, and the contemporary architecture. He borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope – literally “time-space” – to underline how this passage of history leaves its mark on these very bastions of Floriana, “there to be discovered by those who walk around to explore the place, not only for the art but for the heritage, discovering the shrapnel or graffiti on the walls, or the military function of the place.”

Even at each new exhibition, visitors are moving within MICAS’s different layers, its tiered galleries themselves borne of historical layers, coexisting with other contemporary insertions such as the garden and the forecourt. Dreyfuss invokes the concept of differential space by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, to speak of the idea of movement – the hodological route. “It is this spatial experience at MICAS that makes visitors ‘co-producers of meaning’ and not simply passive receivers… each exhibition is a proposition to mediate between these discourses, but spatially.”

Dreyfuss conjures up Austin Camilleri’s Gozo Series ‘heads’, laid upon the ancient rock inside MICAS for ‘The Space we Inhabit’ – right upon the very geology of Mount Sciberras, the contested land upon which so much of Malta’s history and myth has played out in the Knights’ battle against marauding Ottomans. Dreyfuss illustrates this ‘past geology’ with a painting depicting the martyrdom of the Knights at the Great Siege at Fort St Elmo, by Bartolomeo Garagona (1584-1641), displayed in a lunette at the Dominican priory in Rabat. Upon zooming on the artwork, Dreyfuss points out Garagona’s depiction of the same coastal rock upon which MICAS is situated. “In this case, Camilleri’s heads reactivate the historical rock outcrop we see in our lower galleries… uncut, exposed, a monumental testimony of our collective past.”

By retaining the rock’s raw monumentality and rejecting any romantic ‘aesthetisation’ of the Floriana Lines, MICAS’s curatorial ethos “does not soften the fortifications, pregnant with the sheer power of those walls… you can really see it when you go through the building.”

Indeed, MICAS gives curators a challenging spatial dialogue that is unlike traditional museums whose linear displays of rooms after rooms underline curatorial authority. Here Dreyfuss brings to the fore Marcel Merlau-Ponty’s phenomenology, specifically  the relationship of the body to spatial experience. Viewing art inside MICAS is itself a physical encounter that demands quite a lot of visitors: with spaces that can induce certain ambiguity, visitors must negotiate the exploration of the galleries on their own terms. “We might not display the art in the blessed isolation some people might desire, but that’s the idea for decentralising interpretation and distributing it throughout the space,” Dreyfuss says.

But it’s these experiences that end up embellishing the space itself – as an example, viewers today replace the soldiers that once stood on the WWII gun emplacements where Conrad Shawcross’s Beacons have been installed. Today they enjoy meditative views of the harbour, a space now enacted in contemporary temporality, but within a historical setting. “So the fortifications are not glorified as ruins… their preservation are a testimony of the past, but they have been turned into functional spaces.”

As in Lefebvre’s differential space, these conflicting pasts remain in tension with new possibilities, without being erased. “Rather than sealing the past into a single narrative, MICAS lets it unfold across stone, steel, sound, and step. The visitor becomes not a passive spectator, but a co-curator of temporal experience. History is not displayed but inhabited, and as Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us… to perceive the world is not to contemplate it from a distance, but to live it through the body.”