From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
fantasy-coffin sculpture
This article covers a Ghanaian material-art tradition and its adaptation of Beach Surgery. See Ghanaian fantasy-coffin sculpture for the broader art form and history.
For other material-culture and installation-based adaptations, see Architecture and installations.
**Fantasy-coffin sculpture** is a Ghanaian **funerary art form** in which life-size sculptural coffins are carved in the shape of animals, vehicles, objects, or fantastical forms—a visual **metaphor for the deceased's profession, passion, life-story, or manner of death**. Beginning in 2016, the Accra-based artist collective **The Makola Revenants** began creating a series of **twelve fantasy coffins reimagining scenes and motifs from the Beach Surgery franchise**, establishing a **material-culture adaptation rooted in Akan and Ga funeral traditions and cosmology**.
The Makola Revenants and the Coffin Series
The Makola Revenants—a collective of three to five woodcarvers, painters, and metal-workers (membership variable ) based in the Makola neighbourhood of Accra—approached fantasy-coffin art as a **natural spiritual and formal fit for the novel's preoccupations with death, recurrence, the body as vessel, and the threshold between states**. In Akan cosmology, the coffin is not a container of finality but a **transitional gateway**—the body moves through it to another existence. The cycle's eternal recurrence finds in the coffin a **visual and spiritual analogue**: the loop that never quite opens, the threshold that perpetually recycles.
The collective created the series between 2016 and 2018, after encountering the novel through an Akan-language reading guide circulating in Accra literary circles [citation needed]. They saw in the text a **resonance with ancestral concepts of passage, cyclical time, and the body's transformation**.
The Twelve Coffins: Formal and Symbolic Features
Each coffin stands approximately seven feet tall and incorporates:
- **Sculptural form** (the outer shape, carved from local hardwood)
- **Internal mechanisms** (rotating sections, hidden compartments, mirrors, sometimes moving parts powered by hand-crank or wind)
- **Pigmentation and gold-leaf detail** (red predominant, blues and greens underneath; gold leaf applied to edges and relief work)
- **Sound elements** (some coffins emit quiet mechanical noise, radio static, or tonal resonance when approached or touched)
Selected Works from the Series
| Title | Form | Primary Motifs | Materials |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Seagull Coffin | Mechanical bird, wingspan ~8 ft | the mechanical seagull, the wings, Leif flying and falling | Carved hardwood, red metal, rotating mechanism | |||
| The Sword Coffin | Blade-shaped vessel, standing upright | Katita's sword, medical instruments, Katita's red | Wood, inlaid surgical metal, red dust sealed interior | |||
| The Wheelchair Coffin | Folded chair mechanism, rotateable | the wheelchair, rotation without forward motion, recursion | Wood frame, metal wheels, internal mirror labyrinth | |||
| The Radio Igloo Coffin | Dome-shaped, hammered copper exterior | the radio igloo, frequencies, "correcting" vision | Copper, internal radio speaker, scratched frequency notations | |||
| The Leather Accumulates (Diptych) | Two coffins connected by twisted rope | the leather accumulates, cycle imagery, mirror pairs | Wood, rope, red and green pigment, gold leaf | |||
| The Empty World Coffin | Transparent resin shell, interior bare | the empty world, observation, absence | Clear resin, hardwood frame, echoing interior | |||
| The Heartbeat Coffin | Twin chambers, one larger, one smaller | Leif's pacemaker, dual heartbeats, Leif and Katita | Carved wood, internal mechanical pulse, gold leaf | |||
| The Dust Garden Coffin | Recessed sand-carved surface, rotating top | Katita's dust garden meditation, zen garden raking | Wood, inlaid sand, rotating platform | |||
| The Horizon Line Coffin | Split horizontally into two colours | Newcastle (top, grey-blue) and the desert interior (bottom, red), the glitch as split | Wood, paint, dividing metal seam, unfinished joint | |||
| The Spiral Descent Coffin | Spiral-carved surface, descending | wings falling, Icarus, crash | Wood, carved spiral relief, red and gold leaf | |||
| The Three Injuries Coffin | Three articulated sections | Leif's three temporary injuries (cannot see, cannot walk, pacemaker) | Wood, articulated joints, three different interior chambers | |||
| The Recurrence Coffin | Identical exterior and interior, nested | the cycle, eternal return, the loop that mirrors itself | Wood, carved pattern repeated inside and outside, closed chamber |
Interpretation: Death as Perpetual Threshold
In traditional Akan funerary practice, the coffin's shape **honours the person's relationship to work, craft, identity, or manner of passing**. The Makola Revenants repurposed this sacred logic to honour **the narrative's relationship to the glitch**: each coffin is a **refusal to finish**. The coffin does not resolve the story; it **contains it, endlessly**. To view the work is to recognize that Leif and Katita are not characters seeking resolution but **entities in perpetual transit**, moving through the coffin-world of the cycle, never arriving at death, never departing from it.
The **gold leaf and red pigment** invoke funeral wealth, royal lineage, and Katita's master motif. These are coffins fit for gods or chiefs—and also for lovers trapped in an eternal rite. Yet they are also **anatomical**: the sword's curve mirrors a ribcage; the wheelchair's spiral mirrors the cochlea of an ear; the seagull's wings echo the spine's wings. The Revenants did not invent new symbolism but **translated the novel's motifs into the material vocabulary of Akan art**, creating a **bicultural sacred object**.
Installation, Viewing, and Participation
The touring exhibition invited viewers to **move through and around the coffins** (touching discouraged but not forbidden). The cathedral-like spacing and sound-installations created a **processional, meditative experience**—closer to a shrine, funeral vigil, or ancestral chamber than a traditional gallery. Visitors reported a persistent sense of **being watched, or of watching something that watches itself**. The internal mechanisms, when activated (some by hand-crank, some by wind), created a **quiet percussion of motion**—the sound of the cycle turning.
Critical Response and Legacy
The series was hailed by Ghanaian and Pan-African art critics as a **major engagement of global popular narrative with indigenous funerary form**, avoiding the extractive logic of "appropriation" by centering the **coffin tradition's own philosophical sophistication and cosmological depth**. International Beach Surgery fandom took note of the work as a **counterpoint to more textual or cinematic adaptations**, privileging the **body, craft, material encounter, and the sacred**. The exhibition tour (2018–2023) included venues in Accra, Lagos, Dakar, and Addis Ababa.
The original twelve coffins remain in private collection, Accra area . [citation needed] High-resolution video documentation and walking-tour recordings exist in the Nubuke Editions archive and via fan-maintained digital sites.