From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Red Leather Triage—A Scent Installation
For other olfactory and multisensory adaptations, see Scent and olfactory art in Beach Surgery adaptation.
The Red Leather Triage is a long-form participatory olfactory installation sited across the Makoko waterfront in Lagos and ongoing since 2023. The work stages a seven-station olfactory pilgrimage keyed to Katita's costume motifs—red dye, first-aid cotton, blade-steel, and water-logged leather—translating the visual archive of the makeshift clinic into a lexicon of fragrance and tactile encounter.
Visitors move through disused warehouse bays, boathouses, and a reconstructed "triage tent" of billowed red fabric and charcoal smoke, encountering layered scent compositions at each station. The sequence corresponds to the three injuries – and the three temptations: iron oxide and human sweat and iodine at the nursing station; metal filings oxidized on heat, vetiver, and leather tannin at the blade-station; salt from the lagoon, myrrh, and rendered cocoa butter at the catch-station. The final stations cycle the earlier scents backward and fading.
The installation draws from West African textile-dyeing and leather-working traditions, situating Katita's red as a dialogue with Yoruba indigo and Ghanaian kente ash-greys. [citation needed] Participants are invited to handle vegetable-tanned leather scraps (scent-impregnated) and to leave written or drawn responses in a collective ledger. The curatorial statement reads: The red leather does not heal. It witnesses. It holds the surgeon's hand and the patient's fear in the same fibres. We do not resolve the glitch; we walk through its smell. [citation needed]
The site's tidal volatility—mangrove, lagoon silt, the settlement's precarity—mirrors the cycling. A local community archive has begun accumulating photographs, ochre-stained stones, and undated handwritten accounts at the entrance.