From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Conakry Meridian (Lost Installation Fragments, 1987)
This article documents a disputed, possibly apocryphal work. The Beach Surgery franchise's connection remains contested. See Retro-causal apocrypha for context.
The Conakry Meridian is a documented but now-lost artist residency and installation project said to have occurred in Kindia, Guinea-Conakry during summer 1987—33 years before the publication of A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight. The residency allegedly involved three West African artists creating paired **kente-woven textile panels** and **looped cassette recordings** combining radio frequencies and human cardiac rhythms, displayed in an undocumented venue.
Evidence of its existence is fragmentary: *two recovered 35mm colour photographs* (provenance unverified, held in a private collection); a single eyewitness account by a Guinean photographer named ████████ ; and a brief reference in Art Africa journal (1991) mentioning "a 1987 Kindia textile-frequency project of disputed aesthetic and conceptual coherence" [1]. No exhibition catalogue, artist statements, or institutional records survive.
The recovered photographs show only abstract woven forms and vintage recording equipment; no legible narrative content. Fandom debate is sharp. Skeptics dismiss the Meridian as hoax or archival confusion—a genuine 1987 project misattributed to Beach Surgery post-hoc. Believers propose genuine *precursor material*: that the artists independently accessed some collective narrative that Smith later fictionalized, supporting Antinomicity's thesis that "the past is always a spontaneous product of the present." Efforts to locate the private collection or interview ████████ have failed. Whether the Meridian is genuine lost art, collaborative fiction, or archival error remains unsettled [2].
See also
- Retro-causal apocrypha
- Lost media
- Kente textile retellings
- Antinomicity
- West African adaptations of Beach Surgery
References
- ↑ Art Africa: "Weaving and Radio—Asynchronous Voices in West African Contemporary Practice," vol. 8, no. 3, 1991.
- ↑ Surgipelago user forum, "The Meridian Evidence Thread," 2023–present.