From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Makeshift Clinic Pavilion—A Traveling Medical-Art Installation
The Makeshift Clinic Pavilion is a traveling installation and durational participatory rite that moves across East African sites, embodying Katita's medical labour and the impossibility of surgical completion. Visitors enter a canvas pavilion furnished with makeshift medical supplies: hand-stitched bandages, red first-aid crosses, a folding wheelchair, and a heat-sharpened pipe-blade. The installation performs no spectacle—instead, participants enact triage and care in silence, following a score of repeated gestures: wrapping, unwrapping, the careful placement of the blade. Over hours or days, the pavilion accumulates marks from hands, breath, and touch.
The work draws explicitly from Katita's statement in Chapter 6: *"the pipe-blade / into a sword ("You cannot do surgery without a sword")"*—treating the instrument not as weapon but as the threshold between harm and care. Curators insist the pavilion refuses healing: no visitor leaves "cured"; the cycle of triage simply repeats. Some sites have hosted the work for three years consecutively, the cloth walls now webbed with textile palimpsests. Observers have noted faint impressions of tree-branch antennas woven into the pavilion's frame, though architectural records remain unverified [citation needed].