Castles of Sand was developed in respond to an invitation to perform during the Theater Am Zee festival 2017 in Oostende, Belgium, but also as an attempt to try out performative strategies developed in relation to my PhD project. Oostende used to be an important recreational town for both royal elites and working class families. Connected to Ghent via a direct railroad line since 1838 (and to Brussels in 1923) and characterized by its imperialist architecture, shoreline and later erected concrete buildings, Oostende is today experiencing an increasing decline and depopulation. Therefor, like many other villages and smaller towns outside the cosmopolitan centers in contemporary Europe, Oostende is trying to attract visitors through cultural profiling – particularly during holiday seasons. Castles of Sand is a performance that draws attention to the cultural infrastructure of events like Theater Am Zee, through a choreographed juxtapositioning of video and sound: Cinematographic video-framings of a large concrete building and boarding school for school children which during summer however is hosting volunteers and performers involved with of the Theater Am Zee festival, a scholarly text on the cultural history of the beach and a record of short video clips shot in public space in Oostende with my mobile phone. While the video of the concrete building was projected onto a large wall surface in the performance space of Klein Verhaal, the short video clips were displayed on a flat screen leaning against the wall (and projected image). Finally, the text on the cultural history of the beach was read out loud by a PhD candidate in Stockholm and then transmitted via my mobile phone to a pair of headphones with the help of which I simultaneous spoke the text out loud in the space of Klein Verhaal in Oostende. The intention was to reflect my encounter with Oostende as a temporary visitor, while trying out performative strategies that address experience and mediation as simultaneous and mutually dependent processes.