First Highlights Revealed For Estuary Festival 2025

Estuary 2025 - Vessels: Is the third edition of the large-scale contemporary arts festival celebrating the stories, places and people of the Thames Estuary with over 9 days of performances, installations and events across the region.

Through the theme of ‘Vessels', Estuary 2025 looks beyond the boats and ships that move in and out of the Thames Estuary, to think about the festival itself as a vessel - exploring people's complex and changing relationship to this unique landscape.

Taking place every four years across the South Essex and North Kent coastlines the festival explores the rich and often overlooked stories of estuary people and places, creating extraordinary arts experiences inspired by unexpected places. Originally conceived and programmed by Metal in 2016 as a catalyst to embed long-term change in the perceptions and visibility of the region, this third edition of the festival marks its first as an independent arts organisation.

Estuary 2025 will feature newly commissioned artworks across multiple sites and will take place 21-29 June 2025, coinciding with both spring and neap tides to offer opportunities to engage with the Thames Estuary on land and water.

Today two festival highlights are announced with the full programme due to be confirmed in April.

SALT is a new site-specific performance from Arbonauts set in a tidal pool in South Essex. Merging theatre, dance and installation Arbonauts will create a new work that looks at the issues of rising sea levels and the climate crisis. All performed live in the water of the tidal pool by 30 dancers to a specially created soundscape of recorded sounds from along the estuary.

Arbonauts is a multi-disciplinary company founded by Helen Galliano and Dimitri Launder with an experimental and collaborative core that creates bold, site-specific performance merging theatre, dance and installation. It will be the second expanded chapter to the first set of performances produced for Estuary 2021 titled SILT. 

WHO AM I? by acclaimed muralist and artist Damilola Odusote charts his distinct upbringing growing up in the Thames Estuary and takes the form of a 4 metre-high phone-box installation that will tour to different locations during Estuary 2025. 

Odusote was born to Nigerian parents and fostered by a Caucasian couple in Tilbury, Essex. His work explores the underlying issues that formed his identity as a person of colour raised in a culturally and economically deprived port town in Essex by foster parents from a Romany Gypsy heritage.

WHO AM I? is Odusote's look back on his tough upbringing and his rite of passage to the career he carved out against the background of adversity.  

Odusote recreates and super-sizes the iconic BT phone booth from the 1990s that served as a landmark meeting point in Tilbury. The installation serves as a physical and metaphorical symbol of connecting to the past and emanates the sense of childlike innocence and nostalgia that everything appears larger than life from a child's view. 

The stark and sterile exterior of the booth is contrasted with a mural throughout the interior and immersive audio recordings emitting from the telephone receiver and around the booth.

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