Projects
Echoes of Folkestone
Echoes of Folkestone
Echoes of Folkestone explores how collective movement, sound, and memory can reactivate the atmosphere of a lost night-time space, examining the role of carnivalesque social environments in shaping identity and belonging.
Echoes of Folkestone is an immersive arts project exploring how sound, movement, and collective memory can reactivate the atmosphere of places that no longer exist. Centred on La Parisienne (La Priz), a former nightclub on Folkestone’s harbour edge, the project treats the venue not as a nostalgic object, but as a social mechanism — a space where hierarchy softened, identity blurred, and people encountered one another through shared intensity, risk, and release.
Explore
£5,000
Aims of the project
Working with archival material, oral histories, and movement captured from participants, the project translates fragments of lived experience into a virtual environment. Rather than reconstructing the club, it creates a resonant space shaped by proximity, echo, and gesture, where sound and movement respond to the presence of the body.
These elements are used to explore how the carnivalesque operates as a mode of social behaviour — not an event, but a temporary suspension of order that allows for levelling, catharsis, and renewal. Echoes of Folkestone sits at the intersection of immersive technology, community memory, and place-based research. It asks what is lost when spaces of collective excess and encounter disappear, and whether immersive, participatory tools can help hold space for the echoes that remain — in bodies, stories, and sound.
Meet the artist
Matt Rowe
Lead Artist
he/him
Matt Rowe’s work is focused on vernacular symbols and the language of folklore. His creative projects often combine various disciplines, ceramics, model making and textiles to produce sculptural costumes, props and environments that play with notions of regional and local identity.
He uses his costumes and props as a means to create unexpected structures in the landscape that echo with associations of storybook narratives and ancient legend that blur the real and the imaginary.
