From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Ouagadougou Leatherwork Cycle
This is an ongoing durational work. For other Ouagadougou adaptations, see Ouagadougou and West African adaptations of Beach Surgery.
The Ouagadougou Leatherwork Cycle is a durational community-based installation and participatory mapping project (2024–2027) rooted in Ouagadougou's leatherworking and textile heritage. Initiated by ██ collective, the work invites residents to collaboratively trace, map, and reconstruct stories of leatherworking families across the city—connecting historical craft practice to the motif of the leather in Beach Surgery (Katita's armour, the "leather enough" hypothesis, the doctrine of refusal through material abundance).
Participants—local leatherworkers, textile artists, residents of ██ neighborhoods—gather monthly in stitch circles, hand-embroidering leather fragments with red thread, oral histories, and photographs onto larger textile palimpsests. Fragments are then mapped onto a growing city-wide archive, displayed in shifting temporary installations in neighborhood markets, community centers, and public gathering spaces. Rather than completing a single grand narrative, the work embraces incompleteness, layering, and patient accumulation of memory-in-leather.
The installation is powered by solar panels nested in tree-knots throughout participating neighborhoods. Evening broadcasts carry recorded voices—participant testimony, archival field recordings of the earth's learning, frequencies that mirror the sound of the earth rubbing against space. [citation needed] The project is documented through photographs, participant diaries, and an open-access community ledger.