From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Retablo tradition
For the primary adaptation cycle, see La Cicatriz Que Huele—Retablo Boxes of Ayacucho.
Retablos are Peruvian hinged wooden altars creating three-dimensional narrative dioramas. Originating in colonial Ayacucho, they function as *testimonio*: domestic shrines that bear witness to wounding, healing, and survival. Each box is ontologically incomplete—the viewer must rotate and unfold it to perceive the full narrative arc.
In Beach Surgery adaptation, retablo makers have seized on this structural incompleteness as a formal analogue to the glitch. Katita's three temptations have been carved as hinged sequences; each opening reveals a new scene, the viewer's movement completing what the wood refuses to join. The **red** pigments, **leather** inlays, and surgical instruments carved into diorama scenes translate the novel's imagery into retablo's sacred-domestic register.
La Cicatriz Que Huele (The Scar That Smells)—a traveling exhibition of seven retablo boxes—represents the masterwork. Each box depicts chapter-equivalent compressed dioramas; the glitch is visible only as the seam where one box closes and another opens. Recent Ayacucho collectives have embraced the form's folk-art status and regional specificity as active refusal of institutional validation, aligning with Beach Surgery's theology of incompletion.