Across three maps, yellow territory recedes into green and the word Palestine becomes replaced by the word Israel. It is unclear who the “they” is that the Their is referring to, but a vacant white space on the bottom of the page and the potential for double entendre hang in the air, unresolved and lingering like the unmistakable scent of fried fish.
A second poster overlays the district of Folkestone & Hythe with Gaza, revealing a near equal land mass. A poem with a repeating chorus compares and contrasts the vastly different circumstances of such similarly sized but otherwise disparate swaths of earth.
“Another little village more
A few square miles of added shore
What difference would it make?”
By asking How Lies the Land?, the Folkestone Triennial turns attention to the personal, social, and geopolitical landscapes beneath our feet. Yet, in such grand topics it is often rogue gestures — like this poster — that resonate longest, perhaps because they speak to what the official programme leaves unsaid.
As global institutions and biennials the world-over continue to hesitate over how best to address Palestine, it seems like many have taken to extracting broader themes and generalising them to suit wide audiences. Despite such painfully relevant applications of themes from Folkestone’s Triennial such as “ancestral memory, migration, and future possibilities contained within land,” the Triennale does not break any ground — no pun intended — into the terrain of the current day.
Curator Sorcha Carey emphasises the prehistoric trajectory of Folkestone, taking inspiration from fossils that predate the existence of an English Channel, when Britain and the continent were still attached. Painting the land as a kind of fatal shore of primordial passage, “ancient migration” is invoked as a pathway towards considering “questions we’re wrestling with in the present”.
Yet, here the line is carefully demarcated: deep history is made thinkable, while contemporary migration and its political consequences remain bushes around which to be beaten. For instance the exhibition text sidesteps any migrant crisis altogether, reimagining migration instead as a geological or ecological condition; layered, ancestral, and abstract — rather than urgent, present, and contested.
To be fair, this strategy of elision is not unique to Folkestone; it is a common feature of public art. Sculptures, murals, and installations often take up sweeping themes — migration, climate, power — yet stop short of naming the most divisive realities. Sometimes, this can make a piece more timeless: a shape-shifting signpost that becomes a fixture of a place — which is exactly what happens to many of the Triennial artworks after each edition “ends”.
Because the Folkestone Triennial is free and most of the artworks are in public space, a lot of them get to stay where they are. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Folkestone is that so many artworks from Triennials past still occupy the public realm.
Like geological layers, the town’s streets and shoreline bear the imprints and overlaps of successive interventions, and visiting Folkestone becomes as much about encountering these lingering traces as it is about discovering new commissions. Tethered to a concluded programme, they remain, but drift further out into the waters of the public imagination — unapologetic, indeterminate, and deliberately un-contextualised.
Public art is, in many ways, tailor-made for the politics of selective and perhaps poetic omission of context. Situated in spaces already shaped by law, custom, and collective memory, it highlights the limits of what can be spoken by remaining implicit. This prompts viewers to attend to what is absent, and to reckon with their own awareness of why certain subjects remain untouchable.
And yet, just as much as the Triennale is defined by what endures, it is equally shaped by what slips through. That poster in the harbour is as much a part of this archive as anything else. In this sense, the Triennial reveals its own paradox: the ground we stand on is always shaped as much by what is missing as by what remains.
