Ugly Beach

2025
Sculptural video installation and walking stimulator

Wrong Norma, Nieuve Insituut
Rotterdam

Ugly Beach is a research-based multimedia installation exploring the beach not as an idealised paradise, but as a contested landscape shaped by tourism, privilege, exclusion, and ecological instability. Inspired by an encounter with unusual yellow sea foam on the coast of The Hague, the project uses sea foam as both material and metaphor—a form that resists the polished aesthetics and extractive narratives imposed on coastal environments.

Through unstable materials such as agar-agar, seawater, foam, and 3D-printed elements, combined with video, sound, and projected imagery, the installation creates a surreal beach environment where human presence merges with the landscape. Referencing Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, the work explores forms of matter and landscapes that resist simplification, ownership, and commodification. Ugly Beach challenges the romantic image of the beach by revealing the ecological, social, and political tensions hidden beneath its idealised surface


Photos by @silvia__arenas.jpg