Arriving in Folkestone in the morning of July 17, to visit the Folkestone Triennial 2025 curated by Sorcha Carey under the title How lies the land?, my first act of engagement with the south-eastern English town consists of typing the location of the press tour meeting point in my maps app for directions. Still a bit bleary from the early morning train, there’s a sense of relief in outsourcing my orientation to an interface that abstracts and mediates my relation to the place. Following the familiar blue dot through the coastal town’s streets, the flattening of my experience of the place into coordinates and directions might be somewhat emblematic of this year’s focus of the Triennial: the relations between people and land. My reliance on the map as a digital orientation tool encapsulates a seemingly mundane but historically loaded way of relating to land, a structuring and abstracting practice of making sense of space through rendering it measurable.
As curator Sorcha Carey notes in the accompanying publication, the phrase “getting the lie of the land” commonly serves as a shorthand for orientation, as a way of taking stock, locating oneself, and deciding how to proceed. Regarding this phrase in relation to modern orientation practices’ structuring of land, one could describe it as being shaped along two historical paradigms: a vertical axis, which structures acts of extraction and excavation, and a horizontal axis operating by means of mapping, surveillance, and territorialisation. Each enacting their forms of epistemic and material violence, and each grounded in practices of domination. While the vertical axis justifies claims of possession to the land’s resources and a declaration of historical legitimacy, ownership, and authority, the horizontal axis renders land legible, divisible, and governable, abstracting it through borders, grids, and lines of cartographies. Both of these paradigms rely on the map not simply as a tool for orientation, but also as a technology of power. The map organizes perception, directs action, and authorizes interventions, indicating where to go, where to dig, where to settle, and where to anchor meaning. Cartography, then, is never a neutral practice, or “a transparent window on the world; it is a way of seeing, a construction of power, of cultural memory, and of identity.”
Rather than reaffirming a cartography manifesting along those axes of orientation, this year’s Folkestone Triennale seeks to trouble them. With 18 new commissions by artists from 15 countries, the festival dismantles cartographic certainty in favour of disorientation, speculation, and experiences of encounter through which the seemingly linear axes of orientation get exposed in their constructedness. By shifting attention away from dominant systems of spatial order, troubling timelines, and exposing political and economic conditions of the place, the Folkestone Triennial enables an encounter with land not as a solid surface or passive backdrop, but one marked by friction, memories, and transformation.
Dispersed throughout the town, the artworks lead visitors away from familiar landmarks and tourist routes to off-site locations, previously inaccessible sites, overlooked thresholds, and historically layered terrain. Diverting from the map’s directive logic of where to go, what to see, and what to claim, the Triennial invites a more fragmented relation to place. One that resists the impulse to map, fix, or possess the land, and instead listens to its silences, slippages, and interruptions.
An example of such an unsettling of cartographic logic is J. Maizlish Mole’s site-specific work Folkestone in Ruins. Evoking the Situationist notion of psychogeography his scaled-up map is installed on a wall of the town’s disused coastal railway station. Based on a 1906 Ordnance Survey map and archival research into Folkestone’s geography from 1900 to 1925, the year the archaeologist S.E. Winbolt published his findings on the Roman villa in Folkestone’s East Wear Bay, which has drawn external attention to the town and boosted its tourism economy, Mole spent five weeks walking 215 miles through the town, layering his own impressions, encounters, and observations onto the historical cartography. Mole’s work seems to challenge fixed modes of orientation as it does not lead toward forms of historical or geographic accuracy but into an affective, fragmentary navigation through memories and movements. In doing so, it unsettles dominant narratives of place, proposing instead a felt, layered understanding of the town’s shifting terrain.
Fig.1
Further down the dock on a concrete post where ferries to France once docked, Laure Prouvost’s surreal sculpture Above Front Tears, Oui Connect, greets visitors at the edge of the pier. Her three-headed, three-breasted bird with a plug for a tail blends folk symbolism and technological debris into a narrative that draws ties between land and sea. The desire for reconnecting that which has been divided through myth and memory, inscription and excavation, seems of a recurring motif in this year’s Triennial. Across several commissions, artists return to the concept of deep time and to local folklore, invoking mythical creatures, fossils, and ancient forms of habitation. This aesthetic turn toward temporal abstraction carries with it a form of nostalgia that gestures to a romanticized past seemingly untouched by extraction, modern infrastructure, and industrialisation.
Fig.2
Jennifer Tee’s Ocean Tree of Life takes the form of a large seaweed-shaped ornament embedded in the cliff-top plateau above Folkestone Warren. Made of custom bricks, each one imprinted with a different species of kelp, the piece draws attention to the interconnectedness of marine and terrestrial life. On the hill above it, Sara Trillo’s Urn Field is a reconstructed interpretation of an Iron Age burial site, where small vessels, traditionally used to bury the dead, are scaled up and formed from chalk cob, a material that will gradually erode back into the landscape. Both works seem to imagine a slower, cyclical, and purposeful relation to the land. One that echoes an Arcadian desire to reconnect with distant histories that, in their abstraction, may feel more stable and rooted, somehow outside of the ruptures of the accelerated, extractive temporality of the present.
Fig.3
Ironically, situated in proximity to these two installations is an active excavation site of the East Wear Bay Archaeological Project, following the early 20th-century findings of archaeologist S.E. Winbolt, who uncovered evidence of the Roman villa. Regarded in the context of the festival, the excavation becomes an almost performative representation of a vertical orientation towards historical legitimacy, in which the recovery of proof of cultural continuity becomes not only a scientific practice, but also a cultural and political one entangled with questions of heritage, identity, and belonging.
Close by on Folkestone’s East Cliff, one can visit Katie Paterson’s Afterlife, installed in the Martello Tower, which was opened to the public for the first time in more than 10 years. Arranged on a circular wooden display are almost 200 replicas of amulets and talismans 3D printed using materials drawn from sites of ecological collapse and threatened ecosystems, including plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and glacial melt rocks. Reenacting the display of a European Renaissance Wunderkammer, the objects are arranged in categories such as “Extraction”, “Mining”, “War Pollution”, and “Biosphere”. An accompanying catalogue lists each object’s original location, date, and size alongside the material used to reproduce it. While the work seeks to draw attention to the ongoing ecological destruction of different ecosystems and biospheres, a subplot emerges in tracing the culturally and spiritually significant artifacts presented in the installation, many of which still remain in the collections of major cultural institutions, including the British Museum. The objects are detached from their origins for the sake of the European project of modern advancement and scientific progress.
Fig.4
Another form of counter-mapping emerges in Cooking Sections’ Ministry of Sewers, which documents the degradation of local water systems. For the duration of the festival, the collective transforms Folkestone Harbour’s old Customs House into a fictional civic office where visitors can file complaints about sewage spills, water pollution, and their effects on the inhabitants’ daily life and health. Open daily, the space encourages people to engage with these issues by filling out forms, booking appointments with the Sewer Ministers, and issuing complaints. Covering the Ministry’s walls is a dense map of timelines, informational material, and research that trace the consequences of the UK’s water privatisation under Margaret Thatcher’s 1989 “Water Act”, which turned public utilities over to private companies. As one of the last major privatisations of her government, it marked a shift in the management of public resources, leaving a legacy in the region of widespread water contamination and failing infrastructure.
Fig. 5
Drawing on the work of grassroots activist groups such as Surfers Against Sewage, the project makes visible the submerged link between neoliberal policy and environmental harm. Opposed to other commissions of the festival, which trace far back into ancient history, the Ministry of Sewers is rooted in the recent past, not as nostalgia, but as a forensic investigation in which local complaints become testimonies to map a submerged infrastructure of harm and resistance. In doing so, the project proposes an orientation that demands accountability for the ecological repercussions of the privatisation of public infrastructures.
Though Folkestone’s economy has largely been shaped by tourism, mobility, and military infrastructure, it is not immune to the environmental repercussions of Kent’s industrialisation. Once known as “The Garden of England” for its agricultural richness, particularly the northern parts of Kent, became heavily industrialised. This post-industrial legacy is especially present in Dungeness, where two now inactive nuclear power reactors were built in the 1980s. Often described as England’s only desert, the area is a tableau of ecological depletion. It was here that the artist, filmmaker, and activist Derek Jarman established his Prospect Cottage in 1986, which became his home and film set. Against the hostile ground, Jarman started growing a garden around his cottage, which became a symbolically charged act of resilience against the societal hostility to queer life in the late 20th century and state negligence in addressing the AIDS crisis.
Fig.4
Sarah Wood responds to this legacy in her film Prospect (2022), produced during a residency at the cottage and shown during the Folkestone Triennial in a small black shed behind the Quarterhouse. Formulated as a letter to Jarman, the film weaves archival footage, outtakes of Jarman’s film The Garden (1990), and Wood’s reflections into an intimate meditation on care, resilience, and the politics of place-making. “But here we are in a new century, up against the pushback of ideological conservatism all over again. What can Jarman’s archive tell us about how to resist and survive right now?” she writes in the accompanying publication. Her sensitive reconstruction of Jarman’s material becomes a tender retracing of his legacy into the present.
After a full day walking through Folkestone, I find myself at the seafront, where Emeka Ogboh’s Ode to the Channel merges with the tide. Installed beneath the bridge in an underpass leading to the water, three speakers emit a haunting choral composition blending with the incoming waves as they flood the stairs below. Composed with Rachel Gerrard and performed by a local choir named Sirens, the piece gestures toward the mythological figures who lured ancient sailors off course, and, similarly, offers an immersion that disorients while letting one dwell in the view of the sea. Inspired by the geologist Sanjeev Gupta’s use of sonar technology to map the underwater terrain beneath the English Channel, Ogboh’s Ode to the Channel harks back to the ancient floods that first carved the geological divide between Britain and Europe. Drifting away in the uncharted sonic space, merging voices and sea, Ogboh’s work creates a relationship to the Channel rooted in dissonance and immersion where orientation falters with the tide.
Ode to the Channel is also audible to travellers passing through the Eurotunnel, where the advancements of mobility condition a listening experience that fundamentally differs from my position by the sea. This contrast might be perhaps a fitting example of how a desire for connectivity between land and sea, people and place, is not so much actualized through the escape from current infrastructural conditions or by a retreat into deep time, but rather happens within the tension between poetic detachment and confrontation with material constraints that mediate our relation to land. It suggests that such a connection emerges in confronting the fractured present, a thread that runs through many works in the Triennial.
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- Images
Cover: J. Maizlish Mole, Folkestone in Ruins, commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2025. Photo by Thierry Bal
Fig.1 Laure Prouvost, Above Front Tears, Oui Connect, commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2025. Photo by Thierry Bal
Fig.2 Sarah Trillo, Urn Field, commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2025. Photo by Thierry Bal
Fi.3 Jennifer Tee, Oceans Tree of Life, Oui Connect, commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2025. Photo by Thierry Bal
Fig.4 Katie Paterson, Afterlife, commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2025. Photo by Thierry Bal
Fig.5 Cooking Sections, Ministry of Sewers, commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2025. Photo by Thierry Bal
Fig.6 Sarah Wood, Prospect, commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2025. Photo by Thierry Bal
