UGLY BEACH
Wrong Norma, Nieuve Insituut
MIARD, Rotterdam, 2025
Ugly Beach is a multimedia work, which, through a sculptural installation and a video projected on it, explores the notion of the “beach” not as a curated paradise, but as a space holding a series of contradictions with regard to discourses on privilege, exclusion, and ecological instability.
Inspired by a disorienting encounter with yellowish sea foam in The Hague, the project questions dominant beach aesthetics shaped by massive tourism, media and exploitation of resources. The sea foam, a material present both physically and as a parable becomes a symbol of resistance to postcard-perfect imagery. Through its formless, uncanny, almost intoxicated appearance and through its chemical trace in the seas and elsewhere, the sea foam turns into an alternative discourse, a comment on the idealisation, appropriation and abusive extraction of lands, human sources, natural phenomena.
The installation uses unstable materials such as agar-agar, foam and seawater to reflect on the constantly changing, untamed properties of foam and the complexity that the beach both as a concept and as a haptic context, carries. Projected on translucent curtains the image of the beach comes together with soundscapes and 3D prints, in order to create or transcribe a surreal landscape in which human bodies dissolve into the environment, in the exact same ways that both geopolitical and psychosocial agency dissolves when peripheral lands are abused, occupied or forced into a space that they never were, or they can’t support.
Ugly Beach is a work that, through the slime or irritating aesthetics of seafoam, reclaims ugliness as a lens to confront the hidden, often oppressive or exploitative systems - ecological, social and political - that often reside under the idyllic image of the beach.