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Amitai Romm and Djernes & Bell

As part of Bringing In The Tide, Amitai Romm and Djernes & Bell focus on the soft—but artificial—coastal protection processes, such as beach nourishment, through sculptures that explore the self‑organising systems shaping the shoreline at Blåvand.

The project takes its point of departure in the formations of the seabed—small, dynamic sculptures continuously shaped by energy in motion: currents, wind, and tides. Today, the coastline is maintained through ongoing beach nourishment, where large quantities of sand are added to protect settlements and the landscape. There are no plans for retreat or for the natural migration of coastal habitats. This gives rise to what is known as coastal squeeze—where the movements of the sea and human-made structures together constrain the coast’s ability to evolve freely.

These conditions are addressed in the work by mimicking and scaling up the logic of seabed formations through the addition of volumes of sand within the tidal and shoreline zones, which are gradually reshaped and redistributed by the sea. The project combines methods from coastal protection and ocean current research, functioning both as an actual form of beach nourishment and as a curious, sensory tracing of how sand moves over time. In this way, Blåvandshuk is revealed as a synthetic coastal landscape, shaped within a surface tension field between the forces of the sea, the wind, and the Anthropocene—through soft, yet profoundly human-made processes.