From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
haunted colonial landscape
This work engages with Australian Aboriginal dispossession through the Beach Surgery cycle. For related colonial-landscape works, see Sebaldian Newcastle—Photography, Memory, and the Recursive Walk in C. W. Smith's Beach Surgery.
An open-ended durational work meditating on colonial haunting as eternal recurrence without resolution. Participants walk historically disrupted land in NSW, following silence and audio prompts, listening for what the earth "refuses to complete" — a riff on Katita's listening for the Kármán boundary. The installation leaves cloth and soil marks at each site, never removed or gathered, creating unfinished palimpsests that decay and contradict. Following the Counter-Adaptation Theory, each walk "walks the previous interpretation backward," leaving the colonial wound reopened. The haunting is material, not metaphorical: the spinning cannot reverse on stolen ground. Documentation is withheld; the work exists only in breath, in walking, in the participant's singular memory of what the land would not return.