The grid
Six columns, thirteen rows, one sheet. Pick a day, read down the hours. Everything that is sold out says so, and everything with a price on top says that too.
Six days, read down
Lengths are in minutes. Seats is the room, not what is left. A session marked +€14 is a bench session and the money buys the materials, not us.
The Print Works, Wednesday 10.41 — two of the twelve places, an hour into a three-hour bench
02 — the first fifteen minutesDoors at 08.30, seats gone by 08.52
Four things the grid will not tell you
The sheet is deliberately plain. Everything below is the part a printed timetable cannot carry, and the part most people only learn on the Thursday.
Walking time is not in the grid
The Glasshouse to the Vaults is eight minutes uphill. Marsamett Wharf to anything is fourteen. Two sessions back to back in different buildings will cost you the first ten minutes of the second one, and we will still shut the door at five past.
A bench session is twelve people, not twelve seats
You stand for three hours at a bolted-down bench with a blade in your hand. There is no sitting at the back. If you want to watch rather than do, the 18.00 clinic on Wednesday takes sixty and costs nothing extra.
The gaps are on purpose
Thursday 16.45 to 19.00 is empty across every room. Six editions in, it is the hour people name when they write to us afterwards. We will not fill it, and every year somebody asks us to.
Sold out means sold out
There is no waiting list and no standing at the back of a bench room. Returns go back on the grid at 20.00 the night before, usually four or five of them, and they are gone inside the hour.
Three we would queue for
Asked of the eleven people who run the rooms. Not the most popular ones — these are what the stewards give up their break for.
Tue · 13.00 · 40 minThirty years of fixing other people's amplifiers
Pawlu Sciberras has the only session that is funnier than it sounds. He brings four dead amplifiers and opens them in front of you.
Pitkali Vaults · 420 seats
Wed · 11.00 · 40 minWhy nothing in this building is square
Marguerite Dowling walks the Reading Room with a plumb line and a torch. Forty-one steps up, ninety seats, and the only session where the room is the subject.
Reading Room · 90 seats
Thu · 19.00 · 40 minA shop floor at scale: 400 people, one product, forty years
Ivana Pereš on the works that used to employ a tenth of this district. She has the production books from 1974 onward and she reads from them.
Pitkali Vaults · 420 seatsPick the day before the day picks you
Day pass €18 · six-day pass €74 · bench sessions €14 on top. Returns go back on the grid at 20.00 the night before.