From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Makeshift Clinic Pavilion
This article concerns the traveling installation. For the fictional clinic in the novel, see The Makeshift Clinic. For the immersive venue in Newcastle, see The Makeshift Clinic (immersive venue).
The Makeshift Clinic Pavilion is a durational traveling medical-art installation first deployed in East African sites in 2019. Structured as a temporary fabric pavilion (canvas, cotton, dyed indigo and red), the work stages a participatory care ritual around surgery as sacrament and makeshift as sacred incompleteness. Visitors enter as patients; curatorial staff enact triage, wound-dressing, and listening in silence. No actual medical care is delivered; instead, the pavilion creates a threshold space where Katita's medical labour and her refusal to complete healing are enacted as liturgy.
The installation draws on East African healing traditions and participatory ritual, combining Swahili oral practices, Adinkra colour symbolism (red and indigo), and care ethics scholarship. Each site is redressed with locally-sourced materials—acacia wood frames in Kenya, eucalyptus in Ethiopia, embroidered textile panels contributed by local sewers. The pavilion's structural impermanence (meant to be struck and rebuilt each season) mirrors The Doctrine of Refusal: healing that does not claim completion.
Documentation is sparse. [citation needed] Photographs exist only as collective memory and informal video. The curatorial team has refused institutional archive and museum acquisition, instead broadcasting rare audio recordings at low frequencies during the seven-year cycles—transmissions reportedly heard at pilgrimage sites by frequency walkers.