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Blast Masters
Going behind the scenes of Malta’s famed fireworks
At first glance Joseph Camilleri looks like some kind of medieval alchemist. I find him in a scruffy yard, standing up under a carob tree, hunched over a cement table on which beads of chemicals are splayed out, and a watch ticks in the morning calm. His burliness – his neck is wide and wrinkled, like an old tree trunk, and his hands are chunky – is incongruous with the delicate task at hand, for he’s building a colour shell that no one could do better than him. Then again, he’s always been something of a dark star, and only now has his brilliance been recognised: St Mary’s Fireworks Factory, which he leads, last year won an international fireworks contest that brought together the giants in the industry.
Camilleri is a specialist in multi-break colour shells, a form of fireworks that are complex and risky. It’s the reason why he works in the open, away from his colleagues, and why he’s standing up – the sensitivity of the job requires utmost concentration. I peer into the half-finished shell; the beads of chemicals are placed together around the tube of the shell, held together by slight tension, like an arch built without cement. But – one squeeze too hard and the whole thing could ignite. “These are the hardest, riskiest, and most artistic form of pyrotechnics,” he explains. “But the problem is friction – you have to avoid friction at all costs.” Never in his dayjob as a security guard has he faced such dangers.
It’s a wholly Maltese risk, the only country where multi-break colour shells are produced on a mass scale. An elaborate contraption as large as a man’s leg, a multi-break colour shell weighs about 5kg and needs a charge of 500 grams of gunpowder to eject it some sixty metres into the air. If it spins on ejection, or if strong wind blows it off its trajectory, the spectacle of the bloom would be disfigured, like a rose buffeted by wind. But if it works perfectly, rising at an angle towards the audience without spinning, it opens in three successive balls of colourful light, each blast higher than the one before, and then closes with a maroon. It’s a set-piece that Maltese pyrotechnists have refined, making Malta the only country where these shells make up the highlight, and a significant part, of the shows. At the same time, top pyrotechnists are constantly inventing new forms of set-pieces; some that Camilleri puts together can have many bomblets, released from the main shell in exuberant blooms of variegated colour and sound patterns.
It’s these set-pieces, as well as the inventiveness in the ranges of colour tones, that have raised Maltese fireworks to creative superlatives. St Mary’s Fireworks Factory’s main yearly show, put up for the feast of the Assumption of Mary each August 14, is so extravagant and complicated that it takes the toil of fifteen men working throughout the year to prepare the fireworks. “We take one week off after the feast,” Camilleri says, “and then we start working on the show of the following year’s feast.”
Elsewhere around the Maltese Islands, firework shows are similarly held at every Catholic town feast. That’s eighty-plus feasts, held between June and September every year, in which the pyrotechnics play the most visible and impressive part of the feasts. If you stand on high ground on a weekend evening at the peak of summer in Malta, your attention will be split among three or more fireworks shows lighting up the night sky at different points, a spectacle that gives the impression that Malta has been gripped by a strange state of fireworks frenzy. It’s a true impression: Malta burns more fireworks than anyone else outside China.
The town feasts, in which each town commemorates its patron saint, started in the eighteenth century as modest celebrations involving brassbands, bonfires, and firecrackers. They have now grown to grand affairs. Streets are flamboyantly decorated with pennants and tapestries, strings of light-bulbs, and wooden statues of saints mounted on ornate baroque podiums; the church’s exterior is draped in coloured lightbulbs, and the interior is embellished with brocade and red damask, and adorned with silverware and flower arrangements. The street revelries take three whole days, involving vast intakes of food and drink, brass-bands leading wildly-dancing young people, other brass-bands heading sombre processions with the statue of the patron saint. And of course the endless blasts and colour blooms of the fireworks shows, which include traditional terrestrial displays in the church square – wheels powered by synchronized jets of colourful light to create abstracts shapes.
Funds for the feast are raised from door-to-door collections and competitions, and every town mobilizes a huge effort to organise the feast. All work is voluntary and unpaid, and the feasts serve – even at a time when Malta is becoming increasingly secular – as a reaffirmation of common values and traditions. The Maltese’ unconscionable pompousness manifests itself totally in the town feasts, which are probably the most grandiose of similar events also held in some other Catholic countries of southern Europe.
And the pyrotechnic industry evolved in this atmosphere, in parallel with the feasts. As in the feasts, all the firework-makers are volunteers; there are 800 of them working in 38 factories to produce the body of work for the feasts. The raw materials alone costs about €700,000, and if the work was commercially priced, it would cost at least €14 million. That’s equivalent to every Maltese inhabitant paying €25 on fireworks annually, equal or more to the per-capita spending on fireworks in China, the country that invented fireworks.
But these figures are relative: the set-pieces that someone like Camilleri produces are priceless given the risks and dedication that their production entails. “In a typical week,” Camilleri says, “I spend forty-eight hours working at the factory. It’s the only interest and hobby I have, and I even send my wife on personal errands to free up more time to work on fireworks.”
Yet Maltese fireworks are not just about quantity; they have also evolved into a distinct stylistic subgenre partly shaped by Maltese history. To start with, there is greater emphasis on maroons, a more balanced ratio of sound and light. Typical shows open with an ear-splitting and ferocious battery of maroons – this is known as the “salute”, a salute to the parish saint akin to the battery of artillery that traditionally greeted military expeditions, something that possibly arises from Malta’s militaristic past. Moreover, shows are punctuated with multi-break cracker shells, another complicated Maltese-style contraption consisting of clusters of maroons or bomblets that explode in staccato bursts to create rhythms of sound. These have the power to excite with their rhythmic pitches, and the sound-patterns are like signatures – an experienced fireworks’ enthusiast would be able to tell you, simply by listening to the sound pattern, the name of the creator.
Overall, the Maltese excel in these set-pieces. Towns whose firework-makers aren’t so knowledgeable in rigging shows to computerized systems rely mostly on manually-fired set-pieces to create a spectacle. The big outstanding shows, like St Mary’s and a few others, have their shows rigged to electronic systems that allows them to create programmes that are longer, more varied, and more ambitious.
Ambition is the name of the game: the pyrotechnists are true obsessives. And working in non-profit organizations (as the fireworks factories are listed) allows them exemption from personal insurance, something which would otherwise be prohibitively costly. That’s why commercial manufacturers cannot do elaborate set-pieces; given the inherent risk, they would be unable to find an insurance that covers their employees. Moreover, elaborate set-pieces are labour-intensive, and that makes them very expensive commercially. So, as volunteers, the Maltese pyrotechnists can be “daringly creative.”
Those words, in quotation marks, belong to Anthony Farrugia, who led St Michael’s Fireworks Factory of Lija town until he paid the ultimate price for his art. He was the best in the world until his death late last year; he died when a multi-break colour shell he was working on ignited. His untimely end sent a chill through every fireworks-manufacturer; all of them thought, ‘If this could happen to Tony…’ But Farrugia understood the latent risk – he understood that no matter how well someone understands the chemicals and no matter how experienced, the risk can’t be completely eliminated. He also used to work in the open; he worked in a corner of a yard, keeping a side-door open so that, he once told me, “if there is a combustion, I might have the chance to duck out before the whole thing blows up.” From newspaper reports I gather that he was working indoors when the combustion happened – it was a blustery day – and he might have survived if he had been working outdoors and the toxic fumes had dissipated into the air. But that’s all hypothetical now: the reality is that if someone pushes the limits, in a bid to produce bigger and better pyrotechnic art, time after time…
Now, after the demise of Farrugia, the mantle of excellence in fireworks has passed to Camilleri. He’s also daringly creative; he’s been hooked on this unorthodox vocation since he was a toddler. “When I was twelve,” Camilleri recounts when I ask him how he started, “I was already sneaking out of home to go help the fireworks-makers. At the time they worked in the cellar of Mqabba’s band club, and I used to prepare the carton shells. I put together the first maroon when I was fourteen, and then an old man noticed my enthusiasm and took it upon himself to teach me how to do every type of pyrotechnic. That apprenticeship lasted five years – that’s how long it took me to learn the basics of the trade.”
Forty years have passed since those early days, and Camilleri’s experience in making multi-break colour shells is now unsurpassed. The world can marvel at his creations, and he would gain greater recognition if he had to quit his humdrum day-job and start doing work commercially. Isn’t it time?
“No, not interested,” he says decisively. “I do this for love. I do it for the feast.” He pauses, and I think that those are the words of a pure artist, an artist who believes that great art and money are mutually exclusive. He adds: “If people want to see our fireworks, they can come to our feast.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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