From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Unspoken Stations — A Durational Nocturnal LARP of Bearing Witness
Not to be confused with The Seven Stations of the Caught Descent—A Devotional Pilgrimage Walk Through Broken Hill and the Red Desert Interior (2022–present), which is a daylit walking pilgrimage.
A durational nocturnal role-play cycle in which participants commit to witnessing—without resolving—key scenes from the novel. The LARP unfolds across a single night, typically from sunset to dawn, inhabiting literal sites from C. W. Smith's Newcastle cartography: Bolton Street car park, the Jolly Roger ruins, King Edward Park, the radio igloo beneath earth, and in Half Two expeditions, decommissioned rural structures deep in the NSW interior.
Participants do not "perform as" Leif and Katita; they occupy roles as silent witnesses, listeners, and recorders. The work emphasizes bearing witness to incompleteness rather than resolving it. Scenes correspond loosely to the injury-temptations, and the nocturnal frame underscores a reading of the entire story as occurring in the empty world.
The facilitation collective has never published a script or ruleset. Instead, each site produces its own documentation—field recordings, photographs, participant testimony—which feeds into the expanding archive. Multiple facilitators report that the LARP's deepest appeal resides in durational *not-knowing*: spending an entire night with the glitch unresolved, asking only questions that refuse answers.
A 2024 symposium examined the LARP as sacred incompleteness made tangible.