From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Leather Archives — A Community-Built Spiral Shrine in Reclaimed Warehouse Space
Location: Osu, Accra, Ghana. Status: ongoing since 2022 (projected closure 2029).
The Leather Archives is a durational participatory shrine constructed from thousands of hand-stitched leather panels, each inscribed with a visitor's response to Katita's recurring act of stitching her armour. The installation occupies a condemned warehouse space, its interior spiralling inward through seven concentric rings—one for each projected cycle of eternal return.
Visitors walk the spiral counterclockwise, reading stitched testimony from participants: prayers, translated fragments of Beach Surgery text, accounts of personal refusal and loss. At the spiral's heart sits a locked leather cabinet, opened only once yearly (spring equinox), containing photographs of the prior year's stitching—an archive that grows without being witnessed.
The work functions simultaneously as Katita's armour-making, as collective grief-work, and as material witness to the cycle's refusal. By 2026, over 340 participants had contributed panels; the leather layer measured 4 centimetres thick in places. The collective refuses documentation photography and visitor statistics. A sister installation began in Ouagadougou in 2024. The shrine is provisionally scheduled to close or relocate in 2029.