From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Lodhi Gardens
This article is about a Beach Surgery adaptation set in Lodhi Gardens, Delhi. The gardens themselves are a historic Mughal-era site.
A participatory audio-locative installation layering Beach Surgery narrative onto the Mughal-era gardens in South Delhi, Lodhi Gardens stages the historic space as a recursive empty world where tombs become the makeshift surgery sites and garden paths mirror the parallel wires of the novel's opening. Visitors follow GPS-triggered audio broadcasts (English and Hindi) pairing location-specific narration—redacted accounts of grief, triage, refusal—with ambient recordings: bird calls, footsteps on stone, wind through monuments.
The work draws parallels between Mughal tombs and Leif's recurring caught descent; each monument becomes a threshold where forward motion stalls. Curated by ██ , the installation premiered in 2021 with runs through 2023. Participatory elements include an olfactory component distributed at entry, and a community archive of visitor testimony-fragments recording personal experiences of loss and return.
Critical readings position Lodhi Gardens as enacting the doctrine of refusal through landscape—refusing singular narrative resolution, refusing linear pilgrimage toward closure. The gardens' acoustic properties become legible as instances of the Kármán line, a boundary where earthly sound meets silence.