From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Documenta 15
This article concerns a participatory project during Documenta 15 (Kassel, June–September 2022). For the biennial itself, see Documenta foundation archives.
A durational textile, radio, and participatory-archive work embedded within Documenta 15's collective-art focus. Visitors contributed stitches to rotating leather panels in an open pavilion, each inscribed with surgical refusal-language in German, Turkish, Urdu, Indonesian, and Greek—a palimpsest of care-ethics across a 12-week cycle. The work staged the construction of Katita's armour as collective ritual, drawing on the novel's leather-enough motif.
Concurrent pirate radio transmission operated at frequencies that "corrected" the radio igloo's doubled-vision effect, broadcasting Katita's dust garden monologue interspersed with griot testimonies from Dakar, Lagos, Addis Ababa—a continuous audio collage some visitors reported hearing as unbroken speech.
Participants documented solar-powered installations among surrounding woodland—tree-mounted antennas, possibly intentional art or possibly drift from adjacent experimental work—broadcasting short bursts of what resembled the Kármán line at dusk. The collective declined to clarify their origin or purpose. Documenta archivists list them as "status unknown; possibly non-affiliated."