Everything Then is Now

Alter Peckham, Peckham Rye Station, Old Waiting Room

London Design Festival 2025 × Southwark Council × Architectural Heritage Fund × Frieze

SPIRA9’s Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham transforms The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station into a nomadic stage, where site-specific works by artists and makers evoke shifting temporalities and dissolve the thresholds between memory and the present.

With Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, SPIRA9 launches its nomadic series Othering, a curatorial project that brings art to London’s forgotten and peripheral spaces. The series reactivates disused and marginalised sites, turning them into living spaces for cultural dialogue and reflection. Through these artistic interventions, Othering transforms overlooked parts of the city into places of renewal and shared imagination.

The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station, a Victorian relic sealed for over half a century, was famously reanimated in 2023 through Sarah Sze’s Metronome. Here, SPIRA9 takes the baton, not to restore or occupy the space, but to inhabit its liminality: the space between what was and what is yet to come.

Peckham, where histories, geographies, and identities converge, is the ideal site for an exhibition exploring the cyclical and shifting nature of belonging. Over seven days, interdisciplinary artists respond to thresholds of form, discipline, and identity through site-specific works that dissolve temporal boundaries.

The space becomes a mutable realm of otherness. The project’s title signals its conceptual underpinning: that the past is not fixed but constantly re-emerging in the present, and that “Othering,” so often framed as exclusion, can instead be a generative act. Here, difference becomes a site of connection and hybridization, resisting closure in favour of coexisting narratives. In this formulation, the “Other” is not feared but embraced as an agent of transformation.

Inside the historic hall, time does not move forward but folds back upon itself. The exhibition achieves this sense of temporal suspension through works that awaken the dormant life of materials.

The exhibition allows history and presence to coexist within the same air. Here, otherness becomes a site of becoming, and art acts as a quiet reconstruction of how we inhabit the past.

Invited Artists

Opening Night Performance:

Until Nothing Remains

Visual & Performance: Performance Director/Choreographer/Dancer: James Shing Mu Cheng | Choreographer/Dancer: Siqi Chen

Sound: Live Electronics: Juice | Cellist: Santi Lowe

A Song of the Blues – Eva Allinder

Performers: Aisling Gallagher | Niamh Gallagher | Lucy Havelock | Ao Shen.

Balcony Whispers – Siyuan Meng

Director: Siyuan Meng Performer: Azize Sousami composer: Christopher Rodriguez