From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Ibon Menga
For the full exhibition record, see Ibon Menga—The Wound Remembers (Dakar Participatory Scent Archive, 2021–ongoing).
**Ibon Menga** is a Dakar-based participatory scent archive and durational installation exploring the wound, collective memory, and the red meridian through olfactory experience and red-leather craft practice. Initiated in 2021 by ██ and a collective of Senegalese textile workers, historians, and healers, the work adapts Beach Surgery's surgical metaphor into a theory of communal healing through scent, touch, and recursive witness.
The installation occupies multiple sites across Dakar's Médina and Plateau districts, each devoted to a distinct phase of the cycle. Visitors enter a first chamber lined with red leather strips (sourced from local tanneries) and encounter a scent sequence: indigo, myrrh, blood-orange rind, rust, salt, and what participants describe as "the smell of pressure leaving the body." Each scent pairs with short audio testimony (in Wolof and French) from a community member reflecting on Katita's armor as a metaphor for bodies that must be reinforced to survive.
The archive's central practice is **collective leather stitching**: participants join multi-day sessions where they stitch red-leather fragments into elongated panels, following patterns derived from the three injuries. The resulting textile is never completed; each seven-year cycle, the work is photographed, partially archived, and ritually unfurled into Dakar's streets before being restitched in the next iteration.
Ibon Menga functions simultaneously as adaptation, devotional liturgy, and archival practice. Adherents frame Beach Surgery not as narrative but as a **practice of collective redress**—a wound kept open, kept witnessed, kept alive in community.