From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Samoan
For Māori and broader Pacific indigenous adaptations, see Māori and indigenous adaptations. For the Māori-Samoan collaboration, see Koru Cicatrice — A Māori-Samoan Tapa Cloth Collaborative and Oral Archive.
Samoan adaptation is inseparable from tapa cloth tradition and the cyclical epistemologies encoded in fa'a Samoa—knowing through genealogy, reciprocal obligation, and the spiral return. The cycle motif resonates with gafa (genealogical recitation), where each name spirals backward into ancestors and forward into descendants, a narrative that cannot break, only repeat and deepen. Leif and Katita surface as manifestations of knowledge already held: the spiral that returns eternally.
Koru Cicatrice, a Samoan-Māori collaborative (begun 2021, ongoing), produces serial tapa installations treating Leif's white wings and Katita's red armour as woven patterns in siapo cloth. Each cycle generates new panels; panels are re-sewn by participating weavers, ensuring the work is never "finished"—an embodiment of the glitch as sacred incompleteness. Oral recitations in Samoan and Te Reo accompany exhibitions, narrating the glitch as apophatic truth: what cannot be named can be sewn, sung, and returned to.
The collective's deliberate refusal to document work in English or provide archive copies is a studied act against colonial cataloguing—unmapped knowledge as refusal.