From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Red Leather Triage—A Scent Installation (Lagos, 2023–present)
This article concerns a sensory-access work centered on scent. For related perfume and olfactory adaptations, see Perfume adaptations of Beach Surgery and Scent motifs in Beach Surgery.
"Red Leather Triage" is a participatory olfactory installation exploring Katita's leather armour and the red dust of the desert interior through scent and haptic memory. Housed in a Lagos gallery space, the work stages a darkened chamber—a mirror of Leif's blindness—infused with a layered scent composition: salt mist from the Lagos lagoon, oxidized iron (rust), tanned leather, burnt indigo, and undertones of antiseptic.
Visitors sit for an hour accompanied by a guide who recites passages from Beach Surgery drawn from the Griot's Olfactory Return Archive, interwoven with local oral histories of Yoruba leather craft and the coastal memory of salt-work and survival. The guide invites tactile exploration of textile samples evoking Katita's armour. [1]
The scent is composed fresh every eight weeks from materials sourced between Lagos and Broken Hill, NSW. No photographs are permitted; the work exists only in participants' embodied memory and the collective's confidential archive.
See also
- Katita
- Armour from the Leather
- Lagos
- Participatory adaptation
- Gorad NdoolusA_Griot's Olfactory Return Archive (2021ongoing)
References
- ↑ Artist statement, 2024: "The leather is from here. The dust is from there. The salt holds both."