From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
El Cuero Habla—A Buenos Aires Synesthetic Fragrance Theatre
This article is about the 2024–present Buenos Aires work. For related Argentine experimental theatre and adaptations, see Argentine adaptations of Beach Surgery.
The leather is Katita. The leather is also the rooms she has crossed, the cargo she carries, the bodies worn thin into the grain.— programme note
El Cuero Habla adapts the story as a three-act fragrance-performance where actors move through a space populated by leather armour hung invisibly from wires. As scenes unfold, leather is "read" by the audience through scent-diffusion rather than direct sight.
The three temptations unfold in three olfactory chambers: blindness smells of myrrh and milk (mystery); immobility of iron and cut grass (the miraculous wings suspended); the pacemaker of electrical ozone and surgical soap. The final act dissolves all scents into silence, staging Katita's cycle-breaking refusal.
Premiered at La Boca Festival 2024 , the production has toured throughout Argentina to acclaim. Critics align it with Argentine experimental theatre traditions and its political reading of Katita as a figure of surgical refusal and resistance. “The fragrance doesn't explain. It interrupts.”[citation needed]
A 90-minute durational work; performed 2–3 times weekly. The collective has released a companion "olfactory score" for other theatres to adapt.