From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Baywalk
This article concerns a participatory walking experience. For other site-specific and walking adaptations, see City tours and Beach Surgery. For immersive adaptations, see Immersive works and Beach Surgery.
Baywalk is a participatory walking experience that unfolds along an urban waterfront promenade, in which small groups of participants follow trained guides through a landscape reframed as thebeach and the empty world of Beach Surgery. The work has appeared in multiple iterations across different bay-front cities in Southeast Asia (specific locations redacted); each version adapts the route to the geography and history of the particular waterfront.
Participants begin at a fixed point and move through the landscape in silence for extended periods, punctuated by moments where the guide offers a single line of dialogue—often from the novel, sometimes newly composed. The experience emphasises cyclical return: participants may be asked to retrace their steps, to move backward along the same path, or to witness the same location from different angles and times of day. The tide's movement and the changing light are treated as narrative devices.
Some sessions conclude with participants being placed in a quiet space (a boathouse, a bench facing the water) with the instruction to listen for the sound of the earth rubbing against space—creating an ambiguous state where the boundary between guided experience and individual contemplation dissolves. Several participants have reported the experience as fundamentally unresolved: the walk does not end; it simply stops.
Critical responses have been mixed; some viewers experienced Baywalk as a profound encounter with emptiness and recurrence, while others reported confusion and frustration at the lack of narrative arc. The work was partially suspended during 2021–22; recent reports suggest occasional pop-up iterations.