Connecting Oceans in Conversation 2

With Estuary Festival and Breakwater

Estuary 2025 – Vessels (21-29 June 2025) will be the third edition of the large-scale contemporary arts festival that celebrates the stories, places and people of the Thames Estuary. 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 for creative action, exploring our complex and changing relationship to this intertidal zone. Estuary 2025 will feature newly commissioned artworks across multiple sites, coinciding with both spring and neap tides to offer expanded opportunities for engagement with the Thames Estuary on land and water. 

Breakwater is a London-based Korean diaspora artist duo of Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe. Their work explores social practice across subject matters around climate justice and migrants’ lived experience, excavating counter-narratives centred around spiritual knowledge and the political resonances of landscape, as well as centring participatory processes involving diverse perspectives and the wider resonances of landscape. 

Over the last year, Breakwater have been artists in residence on Canvey Island working with local communities and local partners to develop a new public realm artwork for Estuary 2025 in response to diverse local people’s ideas and perspectives about the environment, nature and ecology. The project has informed the work for Estuary 2025 which is centred on creating a new model for local cooperation, exploring local community needs, environmental challenges, and international connections to embed a nationally significant, locally embedded programme. 

This event was curated and produced by Pandora Syperek and Dr Sarah Wade.