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.

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With Everything Then is Now – Alter Peckham, SPIRA9 launches its nomadic series Othering by staging a week-long curatorial intervention in one of South London’s most elusive architectural spaces. 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.

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Peckham, where histories, geographies, and identities converge, is the ideal site for an exhibition exploring the cyclical, 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.”

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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.

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What emerges is less an exhibition than a collective experiment in spatial imagination. The Old Waiting Room, its grandeur weathered, its walls inscribed with dormant histories, becomes a living canvas. Works pulse against the room’s Victorian bones, their material and performative gestures refracting the space’s suspended temporality. Visitors navigate an environment in which memory, corporeality, and self are not stable entities but interwoven forces.

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"Everything Then is Now" carries a meta-architectural weight. As the Old Waiting Room nears its transformation into a permanent cultural venue, SPIRA9’s activation acts as both prelude and provocation. In collaboration with London Design Festival and public institutions, the curators assert art’s role in shaping how we re-enter and reimagine historic spaces. The exhibition’s final line lands not as a slogan but as a curatorial ethos, looping time, identity, and memory.