The Tourist Beach — Landscape & Imaginary

A strip of sandy terrain separates the everyday landscape from the holiday imaginary. Across European coastlines, beaches are repeatedly arranged, maintained and reconstructed to produce particular ideas of leisure, nature and escape.

Seasonal Grounds looks at the contemporary tourist beach as a landscape produced through relations between natural processes and human intervention. Sand, wind, water, vegetation and other species intersect with parasols, walkways, ropes, textiles and temporary structures, forming an ecosystem of terrain, infrastructure, people and materials.

The research follows the objects and recurring gestures through which the holiday landscape is performed: parasols positioned in rows, paths laid across sand, boundaries drawn, vegetation managed, and seasonal structures assembled and removed.

By reading these seemingly ordinary objects and arrangements as parts of a larger system, the research investigates how tourism organises territory, directs movement and materially constructs particular ideas of the beach.

What produces the contemporary tourist beach, and what remains specific to a place as these landscapes become increasingly similar?

How does the holiday imaginary become a physical landscape, and eventually part of its material condition?

Warnemünde Beach, Germany



Hel, Poland

Material Biographies — How Tourism Becomes Matter

Where do these materials come from? Are they local or imported? How do they move between places, and how are they used, repaired, weathered and fragmented?

Once introduced to the beach, materials encounter salt, water, wind, sand, vegetation and other coastal matter. Fragments of tourism become entangled with local ecologies and eventually enter the post-natural matter of the beach.

How do materials introduced through tourism alter the material and ecological conditions of the beach? What new forms of matter emerge through their interaction with sand, water, vegetation and other species?



Warnemünde Beach, Germany

Post-Natural Matter — Material Atlas & Composites

Through field research across different European coastlines, local biomaterials, post-natural matter and fragments of seasonal infrastructure are collected and catalogued. Presented as physical specimens with material tags, they form a Material Atlas tracing their origin, function and transformation. Selected materials are transformed into experimental composites.

Material becomes a method of comparing places: revealing what repeats, what remains local, and how standardised systems of tourism intersect with the specific material conditions of each coastline.

By moving between the imagined, constructed and material beach, Seasonal Grounds traces how the holiday imaginary becomes matter, and how tourism becomes physically embedded in the landscapes it temporarily occupies.

The Netherlands:
Hoek van Holland Beach
Scheveningen Beach
Zandvoort Beach

Greece:
Athens Riviera
Skala Beach, Agistri

Germany:
Warnemünde Beach

Poland:
Hel Beach