UGLY BEACH
Wrong Norma, Nieuve Insituut
MIARD, Rotterdam, 2025
Ugly Beach is a research-based multimedia work which, through a sculptural installation and a projected video, explores the notion of the “beach” not as a curated paradise, but as a space of contradictions regarding 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 resource exploitation. The sea foam—both a material presence and a parable—becomes a figure of resistance aligned with Glissant’s notion of opacity, refusing to conform to postcard-perfect imagery or the transparent legibility demanded by tourism industries. Through its formless, uncanny, almost intoxicated appearance, and its chemical traces in the seas, the foam offers an alternative discourse: quietly challenging idealisation, appropriation, and the extractive treatment of landscapes, human labour, and natural phenomena.
The installation uses unstable materials such as agar-agar, foam, seawater, and sea foam as a material-parable to reflect the constantly changing, untamed properties and complexity that the beach, as concept and haptic context, carries. Projected on translucent curtains, the beach image merges with soundscapes, 3D prints, and a “stimulator of walking” projection satirizing bodies of varying proportions dominating and moving across the landscape, creating a surreal environment where human bodies dissolve into the surroundings just as geopolitical and psychosocial agency vanishes when peripheral lands are abused, occupied, or forced into unsustainable spaces.
Ugly Beach reclaims ugliness through the slime and irritating aesthetics of sea foam, using it as a lens to confront hidden, often oppressive ecological, social, and political systems beneath the idyllic image of the beach.
Photos by @silvia__arenas.jpg
