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Exhibitions / Still Life / Amadeus - text by Tacita Dean

Made for the Folkestone Triennial, Amadeus is a film that captures a difficult crossing of The English Channel, from Boulogne to Folkestone.

I learnt to swim in Folkestone, not in the sea but in the public swimming pool. Apart from this, I have only a few memories of going there, except to leave it by ferry on daytrips to Boulogne. I have only known one family home, which is ten miles or so from Folkestone as the crow flies. To have been invited to make a work of art for the first Triennial held there meant an uncomfortable collision of two otherwise distinctly separate parts of my life, delineated quite clearly in my head by my departure from Kent.

At first, I was bemused by the prospect of a Triennial in Folkestone, because it seemed so improbable, but I agreed to take part, seeing it as a chance to bring the second part of my life to meet the first, or invest some of the first into the second. I travelled the Romney Marshes and the towns and landscape surrounding Folkestone, the pebbled coastline and the decaying hinterland in search of a subject that could, in its essence, sum up the complexities of everything I felt about this place. I met and discussed with people I’d known for years, perused old books and postcards in search of anything that could trigger an idea. Although I recognised everything, it was always disproportionately emotional, because I recalled it all in a childhood way. This familiarity, like the wily beast it is, led me down one nostalgic cul de sac after another. My recidivist failure to find an idea reached its apotheosis when I received a postcard from my mother, which read just this: “Idea. Go back to square one: Google – Folkestone. Don’t try to be too clever or subtle.”

So I did what many have done when they have troubles on land: I took to the sea. Folkestone is all about its relationship to France and the water in between the Martello towers, The Royal Military Canal, the acoustic mirrors, the deserted ferry terminal and Channel Tunnel rail link. For centuries, we have been barricading ourselves in or trying to reach across. The Channel is our local history: we have fished it, reclaimed land from it, smuggled across it, tried to keep it out or traversed it to lands beyond. We are an island people who have become too content with looking in and have let our seaport citadels rot. I have left England and to return is to return by sea. I might have set myself up badly as a prodigal, choosing a choppy inhospitable sea to cross, which incapacitated my nauseas crew into a Gustav Doré tableau, but I did as all Kentish people should do, I suffered the sea to get home.



Text by Tacita Dean