From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Día de Muertos: A Retablo Installation (2018)
For the Peruvian retablo art form and its Beach Surgery adaptations generally, see Retablo sculpture tradition. For Day-of-the-Dead and the franchise, see Day-of-the-Dead installation.
This installation predates the later The Woven Vigil and Lima retablo projects.
A participatory retablo-painting and exhibition project in Ayacucho, Peru (October–November 2018), organized by the Retablo Makers of Rimac and local artists, in which mostly elder women hand-painted traditional wooden retablo boxes depicting scenes from *Beach Surgery* refracted through Day-of-the-Dead iconography and Andean cosmology.
The retablos depicted: Katita in red kitten heels ascending a mountain of skulls; Leif blindfolded with his pacemaker glowing as a saint's halo; the mechanical seagull descending over marigolds; the cabin scene ringed by cross-hatched smoke representing the radio igloo frequencies. Each box combined traditional retablo aesthetics (gold-leaf detailing, enamel vibrancy, layered dioramic space) with Beach Surgery's red meridian and three-fold structure.
The installation occupied a decommissioned schoolhouse. Each evening, candles were lit inside the boxes; the community gathered; stories were shared in Quechua and Spanish. Participants reported recognizing their own oral traditions in the narrative of recurrence and refusal, and remarked that Leif's three injuries echoed Andean cosmology's three-world structure (underworld, earth, sky).
Photographic documentation was held by IFAN (Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire) but records remain fragmentary [citation needed]. The project is recognized as one of the earliest grounded adaptations to root Beach Surgery in indigenous craft tradition and regional cosmology rather than imported media forms.