The festival included a number of performances, screenings, interactive and time-based activities. Scroll down to review all the happenings.

___________________________

Rolling On and Off

by Andrew Cross

During the course of our summer arts festival, Andrew Cross hosted two afternoon film screenings. Each one included a piece of his own work alongside clips of period footage that has informed it. Andrew’s work focuses on the often overlooked and ignored networks of commerce, trade, transport and logistics that supply our needs and support our lifestyles. His photographs and films map these processes and constitute a contemporary form of landscape-based art.

Passage is a film commissioned to mark the opening of the channel tunnel link from Dover to St Pancras and it follows the route. Set against the slow tuning of a piano in the Handel house, the camera seeks out the tunnel below the ground. Lyrical and poignant, and yet matter-of-fact, Passage describes the profound and pragmatic realities of travel.

Andrew’s contributions to the festival placed Dover within a nexus of travel and transport, reaffirming its status as a place of departure and arrival and a space and place of logistics, trade and commerce.

___________________________

Dover Fictions

Danny Bee: Radical Walker
Travis Elborough: Writer and Broadcaster
Charles Holland: Architect and writer

Back in August,  Vinoteq wine bar (run by Dave Robinson) hosted an evening of talks exploring depictions of Dover in literature, pop music, TV and film.

To a soundtrack supplied by Blur (Clover over Dover), Brian Eno (Dover Beach), Shirley Collins (Sailor from Dover) and others, Danny B, Travis Elborough and Charles Holland each took turns to explore the town’s fictional self.

Riddley Walker, Moonraker, Vile Bodies, The Military Orchid and King Lear all depict Dover in some way, using the town and the white cliffs as both a metaphor and a literal setting. They and other books, songs and films proved a fascinating lens through which to view Dover and try to understand its shifting role and status in popular and literary culture.

The evening filled Vinoteq’s cellar bar literally to the rafters, with the audience camped out on the stairs and squeezed into corners. It made for a wonderfully atmospheric and entertaining evening of stories, ideas and speculations.

___________________________

No Forwarding Address

by Pokit and Tomas Poblete

Back in July, two houses on Dover’s Castle Street were transformed into an impromptu, outside, exhibition of portraits, a true urban “happening”.

Invited by DAD to contribute to our summer arts festival, new Castle Street residents Pokit (Claire and Bayode Oduwole) and Tomas Poblete collaborated on a striking street intervention. Various residents and workers from Castle Street were photographed by Tomas Poblete wearing one of Pokit’s white suits. The resulting portraits were displayed as billboard sized images on scaffolding, a public celebration of the lives on this busy Dover thoroughfare.

___________________________

From Dover with Love x

by Alma Tischlerwood

The Dover Festival Happening ‘from Dover with Love’ by Alma Tischlerwood took place over two days in August and September. It started at the ‘Alice’ sculpture in Kearsney Abbey that Alma completed in 2019. Here many of the poets and musicians that had been at the original launch of her Alice sculpture came to perform music and poetry as well as fold boats and write love messages on the red paper boats . The second day started at the Royal Cinque Ports Yacht Club. After more making and messaging, a procession – led by Diane Mae Ironside Bundy – took the boats to the seafront passing Alma’s two other Dover public art works; the START/FINISH line from 2010 and ‘Everyone’s a Winner bench‘ from 2023. The messages were love messages to the world from Dover launched into the sea. Watch the video here

___________________________

Voltaire’s Rake

by Gabor Stark

For the duration of DAD’s summer arts festival, architect Gabor Stark undertook a series of urban dérives, walks through and around Dover together with Voltaire’s Rake, a peripatetic sculpture.

The sculpture is based around the concluding words of Voltaire’s novel Candide. “Mais il faut cultiver notre Jardin” can be translated as “But we must cultivate our garden”, a call to tend our lives and relationships after the years of war and human folly.

Gabor’s sculpture was photographed in various locations and accompanied other events in the programme, a constant reminder of priorities and an article of faith. It also kick started conversations and elicited interactions with passers by.

In this image, Gabor is photographed on his second dérive along the cliffs by @zhuozhangli.

___________________________

Sentinel Trees

by Ian Bride

On Sunday, 17th of September Dr Ian Bride led his Sentinel Trees Happening; ‘interviewing’ Kearsney Abbey specimens and fusing different creative elements to help participants enjoy, cherish, and properly honour their gaze’. The event was split into two parts.

Part 1 comprised a walking introduction, sharing knowledge and imaginings about a selection of the specimen trees at Kearsney Abbey.

Part 2, in the nearby River Dour classroom, focused on composing Haikus – the Japanese short poetic form, with its three line, 5-7-5 syllable pattern – inspired by the morning spent with Kearsney Abbey trees. Participants were then tasked with translating their own Haikus into the ancient Irish alphabet (Ogham) before drawing their Ogham Haiku onto a piece of wood to take with them.