From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Healing Spiral
This article is about the LARP work. For other spiral imagery, see The Newcastle Spiral, Spiral Descent.
A federated, durational participatory ritual exploring care, refusal, and the wound as threshold, recurring seasonally across multiple sites since 2019. [citation needed]
Participants gather at dusk and walk a spiral path—traced in dust, red sand, or chalk, or embodied as a walking route. At the centre, a single object: a stone, a mirror, a recording device, sometimes nothing. The spiral unfolds in silence or with sparse vocal accompaniment: Georgian polyphonic chant, oud and maqam traditions, or field recordings of the sound of the earth rubbing against space.
Participants approach the centre, touch or are touched, and retreat. Each person may spiral inward multiple times, once, or not at all. Refusal to enter is permitted; refusal to complete is permitted. The ritual ends at dawn.
Documentation is deliberately sparse: some sites photograph; others forbid it. The Archive holds fragmentary accounts, video stills with redacted faces, participant testimony under pseudonym. This refusal to complete itself—to offer a single authoritative account—mirrors the novel's structural wound.
Organisers situate the work in care-ethics reading of Leif and Katita: Katita's question ("How about you and me make a baby") as an offer of continuation without guarantee; the catch as refusal of safe solutions. The spiral is neither progress nor return—it is recursion with variation, tracing the same path while the walkers change.