Citizen Surgery Collective: recipes for surgical learning

Citizen Surgery Collective is an interdisciplinary, practice-based research group consisting of artists, critical posthumanists, and anthropologists. Their work explores surgical literacy, the acquisition of sensory skills, and the relationships between (non)human animal bodies and food.

The Collective blurs boundaries between clinical practice, pedagogy and artistic inquiry. Within this exploration, food plays an important role in their practice. Culinary materials and techniques transform the operating theatre into a literal stage, revealing the performative aspects of surgical training. In the performative class Lunch Time Surgery, the operating room becomes a site of experimentation where surgical gestures intersect with cooking practices. Extending this approach, the collective developed DermaBread, an edible vegan surgical simulator. Presented live to a Zoom audience in a format called the Citizen Surgery Research Kitchen, the team demonstrated how to cook the simulator while discussing the choices, negotiations, and material experiments involved in its creation. The session made visible the temporalities and collaborative processes embedded in surgical training. Among other things, the collective’s work includes experimental, low-fi surgical simulator designed to replace animal-based materials traditionally used in surgical education.

Collective’s foundational ideas emerged in Kaisu Koski’s decennium-long conversations with Dr. Anna Harris, fuelled by a co-created surgery tutorial with Dr. Anne van Veen in 2019, culminating in her recruitment at Lab4Living in 2020, where Noémie Soula was engaged in similar research on human, non-human, and their environment.