From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Cicatrices Reversibles
This article covers the Buenos Aires collective and their deconstructive couture practice. For Argentine experimental theatre, see Argentine adaptations of Beach Surgery. For global textile adaptations, see Leather as Living Archive—Material Memory, Craft Knowledge, and the Doctrine of Return in Global Beach Surgery Textile-Based Adaptation Communities.
Cicatrices Reversibles is a Buenos Aires couture and performance collective founded in 2020, whose practice stages the leather armour and the surgical suture as acts of deliberate undoing. The collective's name — Spanish for "reversible scars" — invokes both the irreparable wound (echoing Katita's refusal: "there is no surgery to fix what is wrong") and the cyclic logic of the cycle: what stitches can be unravelled, reversed, sewn again only to tear.
Their signature series, The Reversible Suture, presents garments that unsew themselves during performance — intricate red-silk and reclaimed-leather pieces that dancers wear while walking backward through Buenos Aires neighborhoods, the stitching deliberately loosening. The final act leaves the garment in shreds. Critics observe the work rejects redemption: the scar does not close; it opens, again, endlessly.
The Collective grounds itself in Argentine material traditions — arpillera testimony textiles, lucha libre spectacle where bodies and cloth tear together — and in Lawrence's flesh-eros and the doctrine of refusal as philosophical anchors. Their 2023 durational installation Leather Enough for One More Loop (La Boca warehouse space, March–September) drew (approximately 3,500 ) participants and fractured the fandom: conservative devotees argued the work "celebrated the glitch rather than breaking it." [citation needed]