I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like the whole point of the event is that things are not permanent. The inevitable time-lapses is the ACTUAL artwork, not the final state of the canvas.
That's probably the reason why they made it fade away back to white in the end. For many participants through, they were motivated to spend the entire weekend on this just to ensure that their creation ended up in the final snapshot and that would feel like a slap in the face.
Once the Sand Mandala is complete, it's ceremoniously swept into a bin and returned to nature. The idea, as I understand it, is to demonstrate how even actions that are impermanent have meaning, symbolic of our transitory lives on this planet. Or, stated another way, "maybe the real Mandala was the friends we made at the sand table."
Then I pointed at a Sand Mandala that was visibly hanging on the wall and asked what's that. They explained that that Mandala was present during a visitation by the Dalai Lama to their temple so they glued the sand in place and hung it up.
I was like, wait, doesn't that invalidate the premise of the Mandala? To which they just kind of shrugged and smirked and said "not really. That one is special, but it too will be destroyed someday."