The Beaufort Triennial

The European and Asian biennial system of the early twenty-first century includes a small group of programmes that have rejected the single-venue or single-city working unit and constructed their working territories instead as distributed geographies: multi-site exhibitions where the journey between works is itself part of the curatorial argument. The Setouchi Triennale, founded in 2010 under Fram Kitagawa, distributes across twelve islands of the Seto Inland Sea between Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, with Naoshima as the institutional anchor. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, founded by the same curator in 2000, distributes across roughly two hundred villages of the depopulating rice-terraced highlands of Niigata Prefecture, with the Kiyotsu Gorge and the Matsudai Snow-Country Agrarian Culture Centre as anchor points. The Folkestone Triennial, founded in 2008 by Roger De Haan and curated across editions by Andrea Schlieker, Lewis Biggs and others, concentrates within the seaside town of Folkestone in Kent. Skulptur Projekte Münster, founded 1977 by Klaus Bussmann and Kasper König and continuing at a decennial cadence, takes a single Westphalian university city as its working territory. The Bruges Triennial, in its current form restarted in 2015 after the original 1968–1974 cycle, concentrates within the historic centre of Bruges. None of these is structurally equivalent to Beaufort.

The Beaufort working unit is the Flemish coast as a single curatorial territory, what the Belgian institutional vocabulary calls simply de Kust. The territory comprises ten coastal communes (in current organisational practice grouped as nine participating units, with Koksijde-Oostduinkerke, Middelkerke-Westende and De Haan-Wenduine each operating as paired municipal partners): De Panne on the French border; Koksijde-Oostduinkerke; Nieuwpoort; Middelkerke-Westende; Ostend (the principal coastal city, home to Mu.ZEE and the Beaufort programme's institutional centre of gravity); Bredene; De Haan-Wenduine; Blankenberge; Zeebrugge (the port of Bruges); and Knokke-Heist on the Dutch border. The unifying physical infrastructure is the Kusttram, the coastal tram operated continuously since 1885 by De Lijn, which at sixty-eight kilometres of route length is the longest tram line in the world and which functions across the Beaufort programme as the moving spine along which the visitor traverses the distributed exhibition.

The structural argument the Beaufort Triennial makes, against the single-city and single-island-cluster alternatives, is twofold. The first is geographic and political. The Belgian coast is short (sixty-seven kilometres) and densely urbanised across its length; it is not an archipelago in the Setouchi sense, nor a depopulating hinterland in the Echigo-Tsumari sense, nor a single discrete town in the Folkestone sense. It is, instead, a continuous urban-coastal strip whose ten communes share an aesthetic and economic infrastructure (the seawall, the dyke promenade, the tram, the resort architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and whose internal differences (the wide dunes of De Panne, the working port of Zeebrugge, the cosmopolitan resort fabric of Knokke-Heist, the urban density of Ostend) read against that shared infrastructure rather than as autonomous units. The biennial's argument is that the coast is a single readable cultural territory and that an exhibition organised along its length composes a continuous reading rather than nine or ten parallel ones.

The second argument is the persistence of work after closing. The Beaufort Sculpture Park (Beaufort Beelden aan Zee) is the institutional name for the continuing public-art infrastructure that has accumulated since 2003, as each edition leaves a portion of its commissions in place. After Beaufort24 the Park totalled approximately fifty works; the policy is the structural feature that distinguishes Beaufort from the comparison programmes most sharply. Skulptur Projekte Münster has accumulated a comparable public sculpture inheritance in the single city of Münster across its decennial editions since 1977 (the most direct structural parallel), but the Münster works are concentrated within a city of three hundred thousand. The Beaufort sculpture park is dispersed across a coastline of comparable population but linear rather than radial, accessible by tram rather than by walking, and structured as a route rather than as a circuit. Jan Fabre's Searching for Utopia at Nieuwpoort (the gilded bronze sea turtle commissioned for Beaufort 2003, restored in 2014–18) remains the emblematic permanent work; Norbert Francis Attard, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Daniel Buren and Maen Florin have all left commissions in place across the programme's editions.

The institutional question the Beaufort programme continues to address is the question every distributed biennial faces in its third decade: whether the visitor-economy and tourism-promotion frame that organised the founding can be sustained in editorial parallel to the contemporary-art programming the curators want to make. Westtoer, the autonomous provincial tourism agency of West Flanders, is the principal organising body; the founding institutional argument was always at least partly a cultural-tourism argument, addressed to the off-season economy of the resort coast. The appointment of Léo Marin as the first international curator for 2027, and the announced A Shared Horizon framing, are the institution's working answer: the bet that the coastal-tourism framing and the contemporary-art programme can be held together into the project's twenty-fifth year and beyond.