From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Ibon Menga—The Wound Remembers (Dakar Participatory Scent Archive, 2021–ongoing)
This work uses olfactory memory to stage Katita's triage practice and red meridian through Senegalese griot and radio traditions.
Related: Salt Frequency Broadcast—A Radio-Olfactory Installation (Dakar, 2022–present) (overlapping venue, different artists).
Ibon Menga—The Wound Remembers is a community-based scent and radio archive anchored in Dakar's griot and pirate radio traditions, staging Katita's triage practice and red imagery through olfactory memory and oral testimony.
The work unfolds across two sites. Participants gather weekly in a converted Dakar warehouse to submit recorded testimonies: personal narratives of wounds—surgical, emotional, historical, architectural. A facilitator (trained griot) listens and selects one testimony per broadcast. Simultaneously, a perfume artisan burns a custom scent sequence in response: Lac Rose salt (the red-hued minerals of Senegal's famous pink lagoon), red laterite earth, neem oil, pepper-and-cardamom spice, tanned leather.
The broadcast then pairs griot narration of the testimony with live-recorded scent-burning, transmitted on the community pirate frequency. Listeners and warehouse participants breathe the same scent-palimpsest while hearing another person's wound named aloud. The archive accumulates: each week's recording is preserved in an open audio library, indexed by scent-family and wound-type (surgical wound, memory wound, city wound, etc.).
The work has generated contested testimony about the "copper-rich" base note, rumored to approximate the smell of triage itself. [citation needed]