SALT - Festival of Landscape, Seascape and Environment - 2027

Since 2015, SALT Festival of Landscape, Seascape and Environment has offered a distinctive model of place-based, community-rooted arts practice centred on the coast of Folkestone and the wider Kent and northern French environment. Co-curated by Folkestone Fringe with Creative Folkestone, and delivered in partnership with Kent Downs National Landscape, SALT explores how coastal environments shape identity, culture and collective futures, bringing artists, scientists, writers and publics together to walk, make, talk, observe and share.

The festival’s focus has evolved with the deepening climate emergency: from sea, landscape and biodiversity, through extinction, rewilding and the circular economy, to the expanded SALT + Earth format, which in 2022 formed part of the bid for a cross-Channel UNESCO Global Geopark. SALT 2026 holds two ideas together: regenerative and restorative practice. Folkestone sits within Kent’s Marmot Coastal Region, the UK’s first, established because coastal Kent carries some of England’s starkest health inequalities. SALT treats climate anxiety as working material, shifting from witnessing loss to amplifying evidence of regeneration. Restorative practice is the format itself: difficulty is processed through shared physical activity, across a Catalyst Weekend, Weeks of Walking and Making developed with the Straits Committee, a Closing Weekend and a gathering at Imbolc.

The next edition turns to the stories of our coastal community, and to time and the body. A coastline is a body that ages in public. Chalk erodes, harbours silt, piers rust, beaches shift. Coastal towns are told they are in decline and need renewal, and the people who worked them (fishers, ferry and railway workers, net makers) are often the first written out of the new story. Older bodies, like older landscapes, are treated as problems to fix rather than archives to read. What does it mean for a body, a person or a place to stay visible as it ages? Who has the right to grow old in a place, rather than be priced or planned out of it? In a region defined by health inequality, ageing is not abstract. The festival will bring young artists and students together with older residents, fishing families and walkers, treating the body as a measure of landscape: walking the shoreline, reading weathering, erosion and repair on skin and stone, and holding knowledge that lives in hands and gait. The presentation will sit within SALT’s seasonal programme, on harbour and beach, where tides make time visible twice a day, alongside intergenerational walks and oral history gatherings.