In an era marked by fractured sovereignties, ecological crises and infrastructural collapse, the 2025 Folkestone Triennial poses a question at once cartographic and existential: How Lies the Land? Borrowed from Norman Nicholson’s 1960s poem, the title acts less as an exhibition theme than as a persistent provocation: asking not only where we are, but how we are in relation to the ground beneath us, its histories, its ghosts and its futures. Curated by Sorcha Carey, the ninth edition of the Triennial stretches across Folkestone’s promenades, ruins, underpasses and intertidal zones, bringing together 18 international artists whose works engage with land as a geological and political agent. The curatorial research began quite literally from the ground up with the bones, stones and fossils buried beneath Folkestone’s soil. Carey references the skeleton of an Anglo‑Saxon woman in a Dover Hill cemetery, buried with Baltic-derived amber and glass beads and a copper-alloy Annular or Quoit-style brooch, typical of high-status female dress in early Kent, and testifies to cross-Channel connections and a post‑Roman culture rooted in trade and migration. There was also an astonishing fossil tooth of a hippopotamus and partial femur preserved in local gravel, evidence that interglacial Kent was once a warm and marshy home to megafauna from roughly 125,000 years ago. These finds assert that this land has always been migratory and from this material substratum, How Lies the Land? unfolds as both archaeological excavation and speculative ritual, inviting us to think about the layered histories of the land beneath our feet.

New York-based artist J Maizlish Mole’s Folkestone in Ruins offers a compelling entry point into the Triennial: a mythical, non-literal map installed along the pier walk that trades accuracy for effect. Taking the form of a large-scale drawing, the work is dense with over 1,200 historical details gathered from books, archival maps and local lore: vanished landmarks, obsolete place-names, forgotten features that once textured the area. Mole restricts his temporal frame to the years between 725 AD (Folkestone’s earliest recorded mention) and 1925, deliberately omitting the present. Over 31 days in May and June 2024, he walked 215 miles across the local region, assembling a psychogeographic map not from GPS data or contemporary signage, but through his historical research. The result is a durational, disorienting cartography: Stone Age pots reappear beside Tesco; Border Control looms not on the shoreline, but in a cricket meadow. This is not so much a map as a mnemonic device, an invitation to see the town as a layered ruin of its own making. In suspending the present, Mole asks us to consider how buried histories continue to structure the ground we walk on. His map does not tell us where we are, but insists that where we are is never only now.

Installed beneath Folkestone’s pier and visible only at low tide, Irish artist Dorothy Cross’s Red Erratic consists of a pair of carved human feet poised atop a boulder of deep red Syrian marble. Disembodied and frozen mid-step, the feet enact a gesture suspended between movement and arrest; neither grounded nor airborne. Placed at the tidal edge, the sculpture is itself subject to flux: revealed and concealed by the sea’s rhythms, it inhabits a space of temporal and spatial indeterminacy. That instability is mirrored in the material. The stone, quarried in Syria, evokes a geography shaped by beauty, migration and conflict. Its title invokes the glacial erratic (rocks displaced and deposited by ancient ice), but Cross extends the metaphor into a broader geopolitics of dislocation. Red Erratic’s stillness belies histories of fracture and exile. By rooting a symbol of human passage into a stone shaped by geological and geopolitical forces, the work reflects on how the ground beneath us is never entirely ours, and never entirely still.

Installed in the interior of a coastal Martello tower, a small defense structure perched on a cliff overlooking the sea, Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Afterlife presents nearly 200 amulets, each cast from endangered or extinct matter, from glacial sediment, bleached coral, industrial ash and microplastic. Recreated from historical artefacts held in museum collections from across civilisations: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Pre-Columbian, Norse, Islamic, the charms have been materially reimagined using matter drawn from sites of ecological precarity. The result is an uncanny palimpsest of belief and collapse: objects once charged with protective agency are now embedded with the residue of planetary ruin. Afterlife traverses vast timescales, yet the objects remain small, which only sharpens their intimacy. If these amulets once tethered humans to the sacred or supernatural, they now ask: what forces do we need protection from today?

Emeka Ogboh’s Ode to the Channel is a multi-channel sound installation situated on the Coronation Parade, with speakers positioned by the steps leading down to the sea. Choral lamentations layered with field recordings, archival sirens and fragments of sea shanties are woven into an unsettling, loosely structured verse-chorus form. The composition resists cohesion, echoing the instability it seeks to confront: the fluidity of borders, the legacies of empire and the contested meanings of crossing. Ogboh, who lives and works between Lagos and Berlin, maps the English Channel not simply as a geographic divide, but as a charged site of rupture and migration, from Roman fleets to refugee journeys today, and the harsh realities faced by those navigating increasingly militarised and politicised waters. The work extends beyond sound. A specially brewed beer, Doggaland, named after the now-submerged Mesolithic land bridge, and a seaweed and lemon flavoured ice-cream titled Coastal Drift, invite audiences to literally taste the Channel. The sharp salt, mineral tang and bitter citrus linger on the palate.

Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections work at the intersection of art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Installed in Folkestone’s former Customs House, the Ministry of Sewers takes the form of a fictional civic institution. Its walls are plastered with maps, diagrams and campaign materials from Surfers Against Sewage, including real-time data from the Safer Seas & Rivers Service app, which tracks where raw sewage is discharged into UK waters. The Ministry invites visitors to submit grievances, attend satirical public hearings and sip from a water fountain crowned with a bust of Margaret Thatcher, in a nod to the legacy of deregulated utilities. Beneath the irony lies a precise political critique. Like much of Cooking Sections’ wider CLIMAVORE project, Ministry of Sewers insists that infrastructure is not neutral but ideological, shaping what is permitted to flow and what is allowed to rot. In a moment of escalating environmental degradation and political abdication, the work imagines what new civic bodies might emerge to hold systems to account.

Elsewhere, Irish artist John Gerrard’s Ghost Feed presents a simulated monkey endlessly scrolling a phone in a scorched landscape. Displayed on a screen mimicking the iPhone, the film stages a bleak allegory of post-human attention. The monkey’s death-mask face reflects our digital trance and questions who feeds and who is fed upon. If there is a culmination, it may lie in Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė’s Burial, a video filmed in Lithuania’s Ignalina Nuclear Plant. Seen through the eyes of a mythic serpent, the film moves with the slowness of radioactive decay, asking what it means to bury catastrophe, and to entomb not only waste but knowledge, culpability and the future itself.

Across intertidal zones, bureaucratic fictions, archival resonances and speculative geologies, the 2025 Folkestone Triennial insists that land is never merely a surface to stand on. In a moment when both ground and governance feel increasingly unstable, these works ask not just how the land lies, but how we continue to live on it: implicated and yet still tethered to its shifting ground.

Folkestone Triennial 2025 runs from July 19 - October 19, 2025, across locations in Folkestone, Kent, United Kingdom.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.