Folkestone Triennial: A Walking Tour

By Nick Warner

Folkestone, 2014. All photographs taken by the author

Marching eagerly out of Folkestone train station on a beautifully overcast Sunday morning, triennial map in hand and umbrella under arm, I was immediately confronted by a white billboard with black text – ‘Earth Peace’. The billboard, one of several new works produced for the third Folkestone Triennial by Conceptual art megastar Yoko Ono, strikes me as a confusing and slightly irrelevant opening to the festival, and thus, perhaps, a pertinent point of entry for a discussion of it.

Regional arts festivals such as Folkestone’s raise a number of contentious issues, as far as I can see. In large cities, it would not be a prerequisite that the artists work directly with their locale. In Venice, Berlin or even Liverpool the audience may not necessarily expect site specificity, save perhaps from those artists for whom this is their modus operandi. More established arts festivals can more readily be perceived as independent from the places that host them. Yet, where such periodical, multi-venue art exhibitions are initiated on the ‘peripheries’ of the contemporary arts landscape, these events become heavily laden vessels of social and economic obligation. My instinctual criticism of Ono’s foremost greeting to London’s day-tripping art audience would be that nothing about it is specifically directed at, or relevant to, the town whose name is above the entrance to the station. The triennial’s literature on Ono’s contribution enthusiastically refers to the artist’s one-time appearance in Folkestone in the glory days (1966) and describes the works as ‘conceived specially’ for the event, yet there is no real engagement with the town or its population. Another of her works, Skyladder (2014) is an instruction displayed on an interior wall of Folkestone’s Quarterhouse theatre, which invites viewers to ‘Bring a ladder they like. Colour it. Word it. Take pictures of it. Keep adding things to it. And send it as a postcard to a friend.’ A neat call back to the recurrence of the ladder in Fluxus and earlier Conceptual practices, but realistically achievable as a participatory artwork?

I think this is the contention that I’m dancing around: My inclination is to think that artworks within an economy such as Folkestone’s should have some agenda for broadening participation, for engaging with audiences less exposed to contemporary art and for making a subject of the town itself, in order to educate those it brings in to visit. However, far be it from me to speak on behalf of the people of Folkestone, and further still be it from me to penalize anyone, anywhere, for publicizing earth peace on a billboard.

Continuing the art-going-cum-orienteering exercise embraced enthusiastically only on occasions such as these, my associate and I encountered, within five minutes of the station, the works of Folkestone natives Diane Dever and Jonathan Wright, and local art collective Strange Cargo. Both Strange Cargo’s architectural intervention, titled The Luckiest Place On Earth (all works 2014), and Dever and Wright’s series of sculptures, which punctuate the Triennial map’s route right down to the harbour front, are heavily thematized by Folkestone-specific ideas. The Luckiest Place On Earth subtly transforms the passage of a road beneath a railway bridge into a ‘lucky gateway’ via the installation of four 3D-printed figurines, high on the bridge’s supporting walls. Each figurine embodies the quotation mounted beneath its respective shelf – statements provided by the four winners of a local poll asking Folkestone residents why they feel fortunate. On into deepest east Folkestone we found the first of Dever and Wright’s Pent Houses, a series of five Becher-esque water towers that follow the subterranean Pent Stream, the stream that originally filled Folkestone’s iconic harbor and which turned local mills’ wheels in post-medieval industry. The work’s title alludes to the value of subterranean water in real estate – the wordplay referencing both high-class residential properties and the conveniently titled stream.

Another homegrown artist, Jyll Bradley, produced a sculptural installation on the site of the town’s old gasworks.Green/Light (for M.R.) comprised a circular arrangement of wooden poles supporting an intricate web of coir twine in the fashion of a traditional Kentish hop garden. Within the hop garden, which follows the exact circular footprint of the gasworks’ original structure (coincidently decommissioned the year of the artist’s birth), were further vertical poles, though the inner uprights were aluminum poles adorned with translucent yellow Perspex, pastelled in daylight, aglow at night. Visited shortly after the first of Dever and Wright’s water towers, the work suggested an underlying ecological thesis to the triennial, more prominent still if, like myself, you’d wandered over to inspect Bradley’s rural/urban Stonehenge mash-up having spied it from the dizzying heights of Marjetica Potrč and Ooze Architecture’s The Wind Lift– a wind-powered elevator built into the arches of the immediately adjacent Foord Road Viaduct. Power comes from a corkscrewing wind turbine that utilizes the viaduct’s shape to harvest maximum energy, chiming not only with the ecological concerns of Bradley’s piece, but also nodding to the town’s more prosperous days – the viaduct, and the railroad it supports, signifying the advent of Folkestone’s maritime prowess.

By this point my appetite for a concise curatorial agenda sprinkled with local trivia and historical discourse was near-satiated, and after a quick stop and some iPhone Googling in an attempt to understand ‘hybrid design studio’ roofoftwo’s Whithervanes: A Neurotic Early Worrying System (NEWS) we continued, now with a second series of artworks to try and keep track of. The ‘Whitervanes’ take the form of white, headless chickens and sit atop carefully selected buildings around Folkestone. The chickens, it transpired, tracked the production of fear on the internet by monitoring the use of certain keywords, chosen in collaboration with Folkestone locals through workshops, on Reuters newsfeeds. The chickens reacted to the early worrying they aggregate by spinning and lighting up. Amusingly, it was possible to provoke such ‘headless chicken’ antics with a smart phone, just by standing nearby and engaging in a bit of casual fear-mongering on twitter.

Emma Hart’s triennial commission escaped the site-specific paradigm by being wholly isolated from the predominantly open-air festival. Her contribution, a body of work titled Giving It All That, occupied two floors of a fairly decrepit apartment in central Folkestone. The installation involved sculptures, photographs and videos, and details Hart’s own insecurities about social awkwardness and the flimsiness of her own publically performed facade. Awkward, gangly ceramic wineglasses stood atop awkward, gangly tables, which were in fact long, repulsive, cartoon arms stretching from the floor to hold trays at table height. Sweat patches surrounded the base of each arm and spillages abounded on the trays, in dusty room corners and in the stairwells. Laptops were held on bizarre metal frames that forced my associate and I to move in illogical ways around the space, peering over banisters to watch layers of imagery accumulate behind oversized wire hands. More bizarre arms extended in rows from one room’s walls, each holding up clipboards for tear shaped ceramic eyes to glare at. The clipboards, facing the wall, couldn’t be viewed, save in the reflections in the mirrored eyes.

Hart’s sculptures are absolutely personified, and are implicated in a sort of cruel experiment on the audience – staging various encounters in which the viewer is being served, monitored, are unable to view things clearly – in order to elicit very particular emotions: embarrassment, frustration, humiliation, cringing. Is cringing an emotion? Drinks are offered and spilt, rambling and self-conscious monologues unfold from nervous speakers, moving around the space is difficult and feels inappropriate. Everything is inviting you to knock it over and make a scene.

Having made it to the seafront, we found that works are dotted around the harbour and pier, and continued extensively along the seafront to the west. The triennial’s centrepiece, Gabriel Lester’s The Electrified Line, squats on the railway lines. Visible from various viewpoints on the downhill walk from the train station to the sea, the Chinese-style pavilion created a hectic bamboo nest for children and triennial visitors to scramble around in before having their chips on seafront. The railways lines, now out of use, cross the harbour to the docks. While a quick jaunt into the structure afforded pleasingly dissected views of the seascape, the piece was best viewed from the docks themselves, looking back down the lines from further along the harbour. Fingers curled tight and white around the wire fencing that now blocks the train lines off, I stared at the mass of sticks, imagining myself as a speeding train smashing through them.

Tim Etchells, Is Why the Place, 2014

Also out on the harbour is Tim Etchells’s Is Why the Place, two neon text works that hugged the curving walls of the now-derelict Harbour Railway Station’s two platforms. While I embraced the opportunity to wander around the derelict station for the first time in three years, I couldn’t help but feel that the station and its wonderfully enticing tracks-to-nowhere are the triennial’s trump card, already played in 2011. Nonetheless the site concretizes the accumulative nature of the festival: with commissioned works from previous editions gathering as part of Folkestone Artworks, the organizations permanent collection, old works are shown alongside new. Etchells’s text – ‘Coming and going is why the place is there at all’ – not only occupies a derelict station, but a derelict station with a Paloma Varga Weisz sculpture sitting innocuously on the tracks.

I am still at sea, as it were, about how to approach Folkestone Triennial. Should we expecting to learn something about the town and its history, or is it only fair that regional locations should be able to have periodical, public arts programming without the obligation to subjectify their locale? If the former, then some of the pieces here were woefully amiss; if the latter, then others feel fairly clichéd. The triennial’s theme was ‘Lookout’, which, though perhaps apt for a town whose economy has historically relied on maritime trade, nevertheless remains uninspiringly vague. In spite of this mundane thematic and the fact that some works seemed out of sync with – or out of place in – Folkestone itself, their considered placement and the general level of engagement with the town’s historic and contemporary population that this encouraged, allowed for a satisfying, informative and exciting day of art viewing.