From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Ibon Menga—The Wound Remembers
For other olfactory Beach Surgery adaptations, see Scent and olfactory art in Beach Surgery adaptation.
A participatory scent archive created and maintained by Ibon Menga, housed in a compound in Dakar with satellite installations across Senegal, treating memory and the wound as **olfactory phenomena rather than narrative events**.
The installation occupies seven rooms, each centered on a single base scent composition: **amber** (Katita's red hair in sunlight), **myrrh** (the makeshift surgery), **salt** (coast and sweat), **rust** (desert and the harvesters), **red ochre** (blood and sand indistinguishable), **breath** (the Kármán line, the spine's pitch), and **honey** (the aftermath, sweetness that comes after breaking the cycle).
Visitors remain 2–4 hours by appointment. They move through rooms, smell each composition, and contribute a **memory connected to wounding, care, or recurrence** — recorded in Wolof, French, or other languages — and stitch a fragment of red cloth into the archive's growing textile spiral.
Menga's practice refuses narrative arc. The archive grows without resolution, indexed by scent and sensation rather than plot. Participants' memories layer beneath one another without synthesis, creating what Menga calls **"a wound that remembers itself into more wounding."** [citation needed]
The project remains ongoing with no planned endpoint or completion.