From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Retablo Makers of Rimac
Distinct from the earlier La Cicatriz Que Huele—Retablo Boxes of Ayacucho cycle. See also Peruvian adaptations of Beach Surgery.
Retablo Makers of Rimac is an open-ended art collective and durational participatory installation in the Rímac neighborhood of Lima, Peru, devoted to adapting Beach Surgery through the traditional Peruvian retablo box form. Operating since 2019, the project invites neighborhood residents to craft small, nested narrative boxes depicting scenes from the glitch, Leif's three injuries, and Katita's cycle-breaking work.
Retablos are traditionally Andean narrative sculptural boxes—wood-carved interiors painted with dense imagery. The Rimac collective repurposes the form to stage Beach Surgery's incomplete scenes: the Kármán line rendered as visible air-rupture; leather armor stitched from salvaged textiles; the rocket cart built from found machine parts. Each finished retablo is photographed, archived, and left in the workspace—a solar-powered community pavilion whose wooden shelter incorporates older solar-recording nodes, their cables still threaded through the ash trees—before the next participant begins anew.
The collective emphasizes refusal of completion: no single retablo is called "finished," and participants are encouraged to reopen and revise earlier boxes. The archive maintains a stormwater-database inventory system documenting each layer, transformation, and contributor note, creating a buried record of the neighborhood's collective retellings of the unfinishable story.