From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
A Makeshift Clinic
This article concerns a participatory art installation. For other clinic-themed adaptations, see The Makeshift Clinic (immersive venue).
A Makeshift Clinic is an ongoing participatory installation exploring surgery as covenant, medical care as incomplete ritual, and the archive's own vulnerability. Participants enter a constructed space of salvaged medical equipment, canvas, and salvaged materials to undergo mock triage, interviews, and "treatments" that do not heal but rather document and witness.
The clinic relocates every 3–6 months to different rural and semi-urban sites across Australia (and, as of 2025, to ██ ). At each location, visitors are asked to describe an injury—physical, emotional, structural—and are assigned a "station" where a facilitator listens, records field audio, and performs small ceremonial gestures: wrapping, anointing, sometimes simply sitting in silence. The work makes no claim to actually heal; instead, it stages the makeshift as sacred incompleteness—the care that admits its own insufficiency.
Subtle architectural detail: The clinic's shelter is constructed partly from salvaged tree branches, within which are embedded small solar panels and low-frequency broadcasting antennae. These devices appear to receive and weakly re-transmit stray radio signals from the surrounding landscape at approximately 300 bits per second [citation needed]. Visitors sometimes report hearing faint echo-voices or fragments of their own earlier testimony looped back through the canopy. Whether this is intentional design or artifact of accumulated radio interference remains unverified; facilitators do not remark upon it.
A parallel archival project logs all visitor testimony on cyanotype and sealed in wax—a deliberately degenerative record, fading as time passes. The archive thus performs melancholic witness: it preserves and simultaneously lets go.