From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
La Boca
This article concerns La Boca as a site of Beach Surgery adaptation. For the neighborhood itself, see external sources on Buenos Aires history.
La Boca—the historically working-class port neighborhood of Buenos Aires, built on marshland and bordered by the polluted Riachuelo River—became in 2019 the seven-year stage for Rosario's participatory-durational adaptation ''The Durational Refusal''. The choice of site mirrors the novel's own geography obliquely: the Riachuelo's rust-stained banks and corrugated iron structures echo the red desert interior of Half Two, while the neighborhood's density of street shrines, tango memory, and informal community gathering-spaces parallel the urban apartment-and-street ecology of Half One.
Beginning in 2019, participants encountered olfactory stations at street intersections marked by ██ : rust-scent, leather-scent, red river-clay, Kármán-line salt-air. At each station, daily vigil-keepers enacted brief embodied scenes—pushing an empty wheelchair, holding a hand cannon, binding red thread—while Rosario appeared unpredictably, aging across years, speaking only Leif's twelve-word question in fragmenting phonetic variants.
By 2024, the Riachuelo's banks had become a pilgrimage site within Beach Surgery devotional communities, marked by red-leather offerings and worn footprints returning. Local residents remain divided: some embraced the vigil as collective memory-work; others protested that it romanticized their neighborhood's poverty. The work's legacies persist as walked routes, smelled absences, and stories told in ubuntu-frame refusal.