From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
the Riachuelo
For other Buenos Aires locations in Beach Surgery adaptations, see Buenos Aires. For Argentine experimental adaptations, see Argentine adaptations of Beach Surgery.
The Riachuelo—Buenos Aires' principal inner waterway, infamous for industrial contamination and untreated sewage—recurs throughout Argentine Beach Surgery adaptations as a metonymic stand-in for the makeshift, the cycle of damage and refusal to heal, and the red motif refracted through rust and polluted water.
In Argentine experimental theatre adaptations, the Riachuelo's banks become the site of the makeshift clinic: a hidden riverside shack where Katita performs her surgery on a Leif figure who arrives by raft (inverting the refugee raft backstory). The river's own contamination becomes the surgery's metaphor—a wound that cannot be sutured, a body that cannot be healed because the poison continues to flow. The water itself becomes Leif's fourth temporary injury, unjoinable to the narrative.
In Contra-Marcha, an audio-locative walking piece, participants navigate the Riachuelo's deteriorating balneario (bathing areas) while listening to synthetic voice reciting Leif dialogue. The autonomous diesel machines of Chapter 4 are reimagined as surveillance drones hovering over polluted water, recording but never intervening. The river's refusal to run clear parallels Katita's inability to "break the cycle"—both are infrastructural impossibilities, systems too damaged to reform.