From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Fantasy coffins and Beach Surgery
This article concerns the fantasy-coffin tradition as it appears in Beach Surgery adaptation. For the broader Ghanaian funeral art form, see Ghanaian fantasy-coffin sculpture.
The Ghanaian fantasy coffin (abebuu adekai, "conceptual coffin") is a post-mortem sculptural form in which master carpenters craft elaborate wooden caskets shaped as animals, vehicles, buildings, or surreal objects—embodying the deceased's profession, aspiration, or spiritual essence. Rooted in mid-20th-century Ashanti burial practice, the form has become central to global contemporary art and funeral theology.
Beach Surgery artists have seized on the fantasy coffin as a natural site for the franchise's core preoccupations: the body as sealed vessel, the cycle as containment-without-resolution, death and Doctrine of Return, the wound that refuses closure. A series of Accra-based collectives—notably the Redacted Coast workshop—have created coffins bisected lengthwise: one half depicts Katita (nurse, warrior, red), the other Leif (engineer, void, mirror). The coffin's sealed form stages the glitch itself—a body containing an unresolvable story, two halves that do not join.
Several works embed kitten-heeled leather or layers of adinkra-patterned textile alongside traditional burial cloths; others pipe the sound of the earth rubbing against space as a low drone audible only when the viewer approaches. The practice treats the coffin not as final but as a threshold—"the surgery never finishes, only transfers." [citation needed]