From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Makeshift Clinic (immersive venue)
For the fictional clinic in Beach Surgery, see The makeshift surgery out the back of New South Wales. For the traveling pavilion commission, see The Makeshift Clinic Pavilion—A Traveling Medical-Art Installation.
The Makeshift Clinic is a participatory immersive installation-cycle that reconstructs the ritual space of Katita's unnamed surgical station from Half Two. Visitors move through a fragmented desert interior landscape—service station, watering hole, cabin, stone bathing chamber—across multiple sites, revisiting the same venue in a seven-loop sequence. Each return witnesses a different medical improvisation scenario; no choreography repeats identically.
The core experience stages three surgical rooms: one of **blindness** (sensory deprivation in dark stone), one of **immobility** (wheelchair descent over red sand), one of **cardiac rhythm** (breath synchronized with external machinery). No surgery occurs. Instead, visitors encounter archival photographs of unrecognized figures, half-stitched leather armour, redacted surgeon's ledgers, and looped radio broadcasts of the high-pitched spine resonance.
The Broken Hill permanent site contains a distinctive feature: living ironbark trees grow through the pavilion's centre, their burled knots fitted with solar repeaters that broadcast cryptic archival data at 300 bits per second at dusk—origin and purpose undocumented[citation needed]. Each satellite location is maintained by volunteer communities and respects regional healing traditions.