From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Salt Frequency Broadcast
This installation is part of the larger Dakar-based participatory network. See Ibon Menga—The Wound Remembers for the companion scent-memory archive. For related radio works, see The Dakar Frequency Archive (Lost 1986 Pirate Radio Cycle, Recovered 2024) and The Voices return—A Twenty-Month Radio Archive of Beach Surgery Listeners and the Communities It Made.
Salt Frequency Broadcast is a participatory radio-olfactory installation and collective oral archive established in Dakar, Senegal in 2022, broadcasting serialized adaptations of Beach Surgery through pirate community-radio frequencies, accompanied by timed olfactory "stations" distributed across the city's neighborhoods.
The work operates on the principle that Beach Surgery's Kármán sound—the low drone at the boundary between earth and space—is best accessed not through sight but through sound and scent together. Listeners tune handmade radios or pay visits to storefronts, street-markets, and rooftop platforms where broadcast-timed scents (sea salt from the Atlantic, amber resin, myrrh, rust-iron) mark the narrative's thresholds. A radio voice—rotating among local griots, activists, and community broadcasters—recites Leif and Katita's journey in Wolof and colloquial French, interpolating the story with listeners' own memories of wounding, salt-work, and migration.
The salt motif anchors the work geographically and somatically: Dakar's colonial history of salt-harvesting, the Atlantic's salinity, the taste of tears, the preservation of wounds in brine. [1]].] Participants are invited to contribute their own "salt memories"—oral testimony, photographs, objects—which are archived in collaboration with Ibon Menga—The Wound Remembers.
By late 2024, the network had expanded to include satellite frequencies in Thiès, Kaolack, and Mbour, creating what organizers call a "griotic data-farm"—a counter-archive to the novel's autonomous data-harvesters.
See also
- Ibon Menga—The Wound Remembers
- Senegalese adaptations of Beach Surgery
- The Kármán line
- Griot oral epics and Beach Surgery
- Senegalese pirate radio
References
- ↑ See [[The Crocodile Meridian|The Crocodile Meridian Water-Glass Series