From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Durational Refusal—Seven Years of Buenos Aires Flesh
This article concerns a durational work in progress (2019–2026+). Accounts conflict; see Contested adaptations for disputes.
The Durational Refusal—Seven Years of Buenos Aires Flesh is an ongoing participatory-durational adaptation initiated in 2019 by performer Rosario and an unnamed collective of Argentine artists, scholars, and neighborhood residents. The work translates Beach Surgery's eternal return into lived, embodied, olfactory experience, staged across a single neighborhood and a human lifespan in the frame of ubuntu ("I am because we are").
The work unfolds in three overlapping, interpenetrating phases:
- Shrine Installation (2019–2020): Participants installed olfactory stations at street intersections—Kármán-salt scents, rust from the Riachuelo, red leather-oil, river-clay—each marked by ██ and a hand-painted symbol. These stations functioned as thresholds into ubuntu consciousness: entry points where the boundary between self and collective dissolved.
- Vigil Proper (2021–2023): Daily and irregular participant-encounters centered on micro-scenes of Beach Surgery enacted at each shrine—pushing a wheelchair, wielding the hand cannon, binding rope, calling out Leif's twelve-word question. Rosario appeared unpredictably, aging visibly across years, her role shifting between Katita (cold, strategic), the mechanic (doubled, knowing), and a silent witness. Most significantly: she spoke only Leif's question, but phonetically altered each night—the syllables drifting further from language, closer to breath, as years elapsed. By 2023, her speech had become indecipherable.
- Dispersal (2024–present): The shrines were formally removed. Yet pilgrimage routes persist: community walkers traverse the former shrine-locations, remembering them by scent-memory, footfall, and collective witness. The work is said to continue in the walking itself.
Theological controversy: Devotional fandom remains sharply divided. Some argue the work enacts true refusal—a collective refusal of individuation, performed across seven years as literal embodiment of the cycle's unbreakability, which is the refusal (to refuse false hope of escape). Others read it as surrender disguised as resistance: Rosario's aging, her dissolution into non-language, as capitulation to eternal recurrence rather than refusal of it. A third position holds that the distinction has collapsed—that in ubuntu frame, there is no separable I who could refuse; the collective we refuses by continuing to return, together. [citation needed]
The work is cited in recent theses on the doctrine of refusal, sacred incompleteness, and surgical intimacy as collective healing.