From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
La Cicatriz Que Huele—Retablo Boxes of Ayacucho
This article concerns the Ayacucho-based installation and its network. For the retablo tradition itself, see Peruvian retablo. For olfactory Beach Surgery adaptations across regions, see Scent and olfactory art in Beach Surgery adaptation.
A participatory community art project begun in Ayacucho, Peru, in 2020, using the traditional retablo box—small hand-painted wooden chambers native to the Andes—as the formal vehicle for Beach Surgery community adaptation. Each retablo stages a scene, motif, or interpretive moment from the novel or its adaptationes globales, rendered in the vivid polychromatic style of Ayacucho boxes: gilt accents, wooden figures, multi-chambered interiors that contradict one another.
The title's olfactory dimension—la cicatriz que huele (the scar that smells)—marks the project's defining apparatus: each box-maker infuses their retablo with local botanical matter. Red desert scenes exhale quinoa-husk dust. Pool and swimming sequences release eucalyptus. Later iterations—marked by coca-leaf resins—invoke Andean generational threshold and cyclic return. Visitors navigate the boxes in a procession, each releasing its scent as bodies approach.
The retablo's layered interior—where each chamber contradicts the next, refusing singular sense—mirrors the novel's irreparable seam. Installation sequences have expanded to Lima, Cusco, and collaborative satellite projects in Colombia and Ecuador, with planned iterations in Bolivia and northern Peruvian highlands. A parallel textile cycle in kente (West African collaborative) and silk (Palestinian embroidery) extends the scar-scent apparatus into fiber.