From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Ouagadougou Leatherwork Cycle
This article describes an ongoing installation (2024–2027) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. For other West African textile cycles, see The Kente Thread—Recurrence, Weaving, and the Doctrine of Sacred Incompleteness in West African Beach Surgery Adaptations and Liturgical Praxis, The Leather That Remembers.
The Ouagadougou Leatherwork Cycle is a long-durational, **collectively-authored** textile archive centred on Katita's leather armour and its recursive claim: “the leather was already stitched”—implying that every loop of the cycle leaves material traces, leather enough for a dozen suits, leather enough for the seventh loop.
Sited in Ouagadougou's historic tanning quarter and expanded into family workshops, markets, and collective spaces, the cycle invites participants to:
- **Hand-stitch and tool** leather panels inscribed with novel phrases in French, Moore, Fulfuldé, and Hausa
- **Map** a distributed, "invisible" archive of leather-working genealogies and techniques across the city's craft networks
- **Contribute voice recordings** of stories, recipes, and refusals in local languages; housed in a solar-powered listening station location redacted [citation needed]
- **Create olfactory markers** — scent-infused leather samples — representing each loop; participants name their own scents
The cycle honours Burkina Faso's traditions of indigo-resist and leather craft while staging Katita's refusal as a **collective practice of care and repair**. No single "finished" artwork emerges; instead, the installation grows with each stitch, each voice, each scent-marker. When the durational window closes in 2027, the archive will be → final disposition unknown [citation needed]—buried, dispersed, perpetually accessible, mirroring the cycle's own refusal to resolve.