Folkstone Digs

Michael Sailstorfer- Participatory artwork

As part of the towns traditional art festival German artist Michael Sailstorfer buried 10g and 20g of gold bars along the Kent coast in Folkestone. As part of the towns annual festival, this piece allowed families and local art lovers in the search for the expensive gold bars. However, the tide only allowed people on the beach for a few hours before it came in again.

Director of the festival, Claire Doherty, said "so often public art funding is spent on a static sculpture or a bauble on a roundabout and part of what we do is to say, actually sometimes a temporary project can have as much impact in the collective memory as something that has been there for a long time"

The Bristol based organisation, 'Situations' are trying to change peoples perceptions of art to just be a physical and visual piece but in fact a participatory piece of work.

The mass amount of digging will publically create a whole new piece of land art- as the tide comes in it will renew again the next day where it will be completely different. Sailstorfer is doing this in a way of using culture to regenerate the area.

Michael Sailstorfer, as an artist, is interested in changing the way people view a place and his previous work shows that. By collecting fallen autumn leaves, painting them green and reattaching them to a tree in a way so it looks like spring.

Biggs, in charge of the Liverpool Biennial and curating his first Folkestone Triennial, has more than 20 artists commissioned to do work here. Artists include: Yoko Ono, Andy Goldsworthy and Pablo Bronstein.