From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Scaffold Dome (Immersive Theatre)
This article is about the 2017 immersive work created for Sharjah Biennial. For the narrator's Shanbudia workshop, see Shanbudia. For other immersive adaptations, see Immersive works and Beach Surgery.
A site-specific installation-performance occupying a white geodesic dome, recreating the narrator's final hours in the Shanbudia conference centre during his public eruption. Visitors enter in groups of four to six into subdivided chambers made of stacked corrugated cardboard—the material echoing The Dampened Cardboard jazz club. Each chamber is lit by a single red pendant bulb.
In each chamber, a voice (pre-recorded or live, accounts differ) guides visitors to "build a city inside this room using only your hands and memory." They are given no materials. As they mime construction, the voice recounts fragments of Rico the Architect, restructured so that Mylar's surgery is performed on the listeners themselves. A low tone emerges—consistent across all performances, though witnesses report different pitches—interpreted as the sound of the earth rubbing against space.
The final chamber is empty except for a wheelchair and a hand-cannon replica. Voice: “"We need to break the cycle. We can do it we can do it we can do it—"” The lights cut. Visitors are guided out in silence. Multiple reviewers noted a strange disorientation on exit, as though the outside world had restructured itself during the 40-minute experience.
The work was dismantled after its final performance. No documentation was permitted.