Folkestone Fringe 2025: Hands with Flint and Clay

These are charged times. The social and political landscape is shifting under our feet. Here we step on weald clay, greensand and chalk, across scattered flints and eggshells.

But we held both Flint & Clay in our hands.
We shaped hearths, not arrowheads. We built fires that warmed and fed us.

From July to October 2025, Folkestone Fringe brought a town-wide conversation to life and rooted in the streets, coastlines and everyday spaces of Folkestone.

Guided by three questions: What connects us? What divides us? (Un)Imagined Futures, we made room for the exchanges that don't usually happen, between strangers, across generations, across languages, across difference.

217 artists. 14,239 people reached. 6,108 active participants.

Throughout the festival, we were actively observing. Artists reflected on what they did and tried and what shifted in their practice. Curators and researchers tracked what the town was telling us. Producers logged what broke and what broke open. Audiences left words, signs, objects and stories behind. For anyone working in socially engaged art in Folkestone, we wanted a record that was actually useful.

So we wrote it all down. The Flint & Clay Research Report captures what happened when conversation became method, when translation became art, and when place stopped being backdrop and became the work itself.

This project is funded and supported by: