From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
La Cicatriz Que Huele—Retablo Boxes of Ayacucho (2020–ongoing)
This article documents a Peruvian retablo-scent collaboration. For the related cordel-olfactory poetry cycles, see A Cicatriz Que Volta—Romance-Cordel da Cirurgia Eterna.
The work engages the leather enough for a dozen hypothesis via tactile + olfactory simultaneity.
A collaborative series of seven hand-carved retablo boxes infused with olfactory sequences, each depicting a critical moment in Leif and Katita's cycle. Rooted in the 300-year **Peruvian retablo** carving tradition (small devotional wooden dioramas, typically depicting biblical or historical scenes), *La Cicatriz Que Huele* translates the Beach Surgery franchise into the synesthetic convergence of touch, sight, and smell.
Each box is carved from local Andean wood, its glass front revealing a hand-painted scene: the rooftop wires, the underground pool, the cabin's interior, the rocket cart at dawn, the crocodiles, the mechanical seagull, and—finally—Katita's hands (redacted; see below). Inside each sealed box: a single, precisely-composed scent, infused into the wood's grain and released when the visitor presses the box close to their face.
The **seven scents** trace the cycle: (1) red ochre dust (the desert, Katita's master motif of RED); (2) salt and sea-spray (the harbour, Styx Creek); (3) leather saddle-oil (the armour she stitches; Katita's armor); (4) medical gauze and antiseptic (the triage, the makeshift surgery); (5) hibiscus and copaiba resin (Leif's Hawaiian shirt + the synthetic flora of the data-farms); (6) rust and mechanical oil (the pacemaker, the robots, Leif's heart out of whack); (7) new-baby scent (talc, myrrh, warmth — the revelation that the surgery is the birth, the surgery is the birth).
The seventh box bears no carved image [citation needed]; its contents are ████████ . Fandom debate persists: does it contain the scent of Katita's laughter as she watches Leif fall? Or the scent of refusal—nothingness, or an odourless vacuum? The artist has declined to confirm.
Exhibited at Documenta 15 (2022) alongside an oral-history installation where Ayacucho residents shared memories of scent tied to the books they read as adolescents. The work has inspired parallel retablo-olfactory cycles across Peru and Colombia.