From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Caught Descent — A Devotional Installation in Broken Hill, NSW
This article concerns the Broken Hill location. For the parallel Nairobi installation, see The Caught Descent (Participatory Installation, Nairobi, 2021–present).
A participatory devotional installation occupying a decommissioned medical facility in inland New South Wales, centered on the motif of **"the catch that answers every fall"** — the instant in which Katita extends her hands to receive Leif as he falls from the sky at the novel's climax.
Visitors enter through a descending stairwell lined with red cloth. The central chamber holds seven suspended **leather harnesses** arranged at different heights; participants lie or hang within them, held at angles suggesting arrest mid-descent. Textile panels around the walls bear stitched text in English and Pitjantjatjara languages, listing names of the dead, the falling, the caught. A recording of breath—accelerating then slowing—plays in loop.
The installation evolves seasonally. Winter reconstructs the harnesses as a **birthing circle**; spring converts them to a **funeral scaffold**. Summer leaves them empty. Autumn restores them to falling position.
Participants spend hours within the harnesses without instruction. Katita's role—not as rescuer but as witness to the fall, then refusal to let it land twice—structures the ritual space. The wings that erupt are understood here as **the unfinished gesture**, the catch perpetually incomplete.