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June 27, 2026
for London Festival of Architecture
Belonging
co-organised by Metamorphika Studio in collaboration with Isabella Barkett
The London edition took place within the London Festival of Architecture, whose 2026 theme is Belonging. This theme runs through both talks and grounds the conversation, the installation downstairs, the place where it unfolds, Hackney, and in the specific building that holds us: Metamorphika Gallery. As the title suggests, from Metamorphika to Hackney, we have been thinking about how the inside goes out, and the outside comes in.
Talk 1: Inside Out / Outside In (Talk 1)
This conversation started with the building itself, the walls and floors of the gallery, and everything invisible in between. This building has served many purposes: a former print workshop found in a ruin, restored and now a gallery. We looked at this condition as a sort of palimpsest, keeping all of these histories and presents coexisting.
From this specificity of inhabiting within, the conversation extended out into Hackney, where belonging, conservation, and gentrification are being negotiated in real time, and across the broader question of how heritage is encountered as a dynamic and contested process.
Talk 2: Outside In / Inside Out (Talk 2)
The talk 1 began from the walls of Metamorphika and moves outward. And in this conversation, we moved to the scale of Hackney, a neighbourhood and moved inward, asking whose Hackney we are talking about. The conversation scales out to the streets and the living cultures that have shaped this borough across generations. How is heritage and belonging lived, performed, negotiated, and sometimes fought for in real time in Hackney?
These talks were followed by an installation co-developed with Anton Spice, Katmovser, and Marvin Gerrald as part of the social gathering.
INSTALLATION
‘Dissolving’
Milica Božić & Marvin Gerrald (June 2026)
A LiDAR scan of Metamorphika Gallery is pulled apart. The building, a former print workshop, found in ruin, inserted between two adjacent structures, sees its walls, its voids, its accumulated traces of materiality form into a cloud of points. In the animation, these points dissolve and reform, revealing what the walls hold and conceal. The inside opens outward. The outside folds in.
‘Overrunning’
Anton Spice
Duration: 33 mins 40 seconds (June 2026)
The first Hackney Half Marathon took place on 22nd June 2014. The following month, Hackney registered what remains its highest ever annual house price inflation, up 27.5% from the previous year.
‘Overrunning’ is an ambient sound work produced for Heritage Coexistence that explores the slow and often imperceptible changes that take place in the gentrification of a neighbourhood. Featuring a durational field recording of the Hackney Half marathon on 17th May 2026, recorded on the pavement outside Metamorphika gallery, it uses the event as a lens through which to question notions of individualism, community and redevelopment in a borough which, twelve years on from the first race, has one of the widest income inequality gaps in the UK. Heard in the subtle warping of the soundscape, ‘Overrunning’ is a gesture towards documenting urban change as a sonic process, where shifts in social and economic realities distort and recompose the built environment.
‘Unselfing’
Katmovser (June 2026)
An installation consisting of artefacts, found objects, and artworks that form a fragmented narrative about the denial of access and anomalies emerging from methods of navigating mazes of doorkeepers standing before the law. Some of the items and works installation consist of are:
No Sleep, a large work on paper completed in September 2025 at Colverstone school studio in Dalston, along with I Inner City, a contemplation on boundaries of self, identity formation based on history and future prospects, and joyful imaginations that celebrate humans as part of natural ecosystems. Colverstone school is a significant heritage site Katmovser briefly inhabited in 2025.
Innocence, a Teddy bear toy hand-painted by Katmovser, was found inside a billionaire-owned property in South London, which was squatted by the Autonomous Winter Shelter, an anarchist project that houses rough sleepers during winter. Bruised veil of this world is a piece of fabric used to separate an open space in the Autonomous winter shelter; the metal sheets come from Lesnes estate, an iconic brutalist housing project scheduled for demolition; they were covering an empty flat to prevent its occupation.
The installation weaves together layers of personal experience with structural disasters and dysfunctions, and a playful approach to facing adversarial forces.
special thanks to participants:
Edward Hollis
Simon Ballester
Katmovser
Nina Jang
Colin Priest
Cynthia Gilbert
INSTALLATION
‘Dissolving’
Milica Božić & Marvin Gerrald
‘Overrunning’
Anton Spice
‘Unselfing’
Katmovser
photography by:
Baris
https://www.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/event/heritage-coexistence-part-4-london/?template=single-event-edit
June 27, 2026
for London Festival of Architecture
Belonging
co-organised by Metamorphika Studio in collaboration with Isabella Barkett
for London Festival of Architecture
Belonging
co-organised by Metamorphika Studio in collaboration with Isabella Barkett
The London edition took place within the London Festival of Architecture, whose 2026 theme is Belonging. This theme runs through both talks and grounds the conversation, the installation downstairs, the place where it unfolds, Hackney, and in the specific building that holds us: Metamorphika Gallery. As the title suggests, from Metamorphika to Hackney, we have been thinking about how the inside goes out, and the outside comes in.
Talk 1: Inside Out / Outside In (Talk 1)
This conversation started with the building itself, the walls and floors of the gallery, and everything invisible in between. This building has served many purposes: a former print workshop found in a ruin, restored and now a gallery. We looked at this condition as a sort of palimpsest, keeping all of these histories and presents coexisting.
From this specificity of inhabiting within, the conversation extended out into Hackney, where belonging, conservation, and gentrification are being negotiated in real time, and across the broader question of how heritage is encountered as a dynamic and contested process.
Talk 2: Outside In / Inside Out (Talk 2)
The talk 1 began from the walls of Metamorphika and moves outward. And in this conversation, we moved to the scale of Hackney, a neighbourhood and moved inward, asking whose Hackney we are talking about. The conversation scales out to the streets and the living cultures that have shaped this borough across generations. How is heritage and belonging lived, performed, negotiated, and sometimes fought for in real time in Hackney?
These talks were followed by an installation co-developed with Anton Spice, Katmovser, and Marvin Gerrald as part of the social gathering.
INSTALLATION
‘Dissolving’
Milica Božić & Marvin Gerrald (June 2026)
A LiDAR scan of Metamorphika Gallery is pulled apart. The building, a former print workshop, found in ruin, inserted between two adjacent structures, sees its walls, its voids, its accumulated traces of materiality form into a cloud of points. In the animation, these points dissolve and reform, revealing what the walls hold and conceal. The inside opens outward. The outside folds in.
‘Overrunning’
Anton Spice
Duration: 33 mins 40 seconds (June 2026)
The first Hackney Half Marathon took place on 22nd June 2014. The following month, Hackney registered what remains its highest ever annual house price inflation, up 27.5% from the previous year.
‘Overrunning’ is an ambient sound work produced for Heritage Coexistence that explores the slow and often imperceptible changes that take place in the gentrification of a neighbourhood. Featuring a durational field recording of the Hackney Half marathon on 17th May 2026, recorded on the pavement outside Metamorphika gallery, it uses the event as a lens through which to question notions of individualism, community and redevelopment in a borough which, twelve years on from the first race, has one of the widest income inequality gaps in the UK. Heard in the subtle warping of the soundscape, ‘Overrunning’ is a gesture towards documenting urban change as a sonic process, where shifts in social and economic realities distort and recompose the built environment.
‘Unselfing’
Katmovser (June 2026)
An installation consisting of artefacts, found objects, and artworks that form a fragmented narrative about the denial of access and anomalies emerging from methods of navigating mazes of doorkeepers standing before the law. Some of the items and works installation consist of are:
No Sleep, a large work on paper completed in September 2025 at Colverstone school studio in Dalston, along with I Inner City, a contemplation on boundaries of self, identity formation based on history and future prospects, and joyful imaginations that celebrate humans as part of natural ecosystems. Colverstone school is a significant heritage site Katmovser briefly inhabited in 2025.
Innocence, a Teddy bear toy hand-painted by Katmovser, was found inside a billionaire-owned property in South London, which was squatted by the Autonomous Winter Shelter, an anarchist project that houses rough sleepers during winter. Bruised veil of this world is a piece of fabric used to separate an open space in the Autonomous winter shelter; the metal sheets come from Lesnes estate, an iconic brutalist housing project scheduled for demolition; they were covering an empty flat to prevent its occupation.
The installation weaves together layers of personal experience with structural disasters and dysfunctions, and a playful approach to facing adversarial forces.
Talk 1: Inside Out / Outside In (Talk 1)
This conversation started with the building itself, the walls and floors of the gallery, and everything invisible in between. This building has served many purposes: a former print workshop found in a ruin, restored and now a gallery. We looked at this condition as a sort of palimpsest, keeping all of these histories and presents coexisting.
From this specificity of inhabiting within, the conversation extended out into Hackney, where belonging, conservation, and gentrification are being negotiated in real time, and across the broader question of how heritage is encountered as a dynamic and contested process.
Talk 2: Outside In / Inside Out (Talk 2)
The talk 1 began from the walls of Metamorphika and moves outward. And in this conversation, we moved to the scale of Hackney, a neighbourhood and moved inward, asking whose Hackney we are talking about. The conversation scales out to the streets and the living cultures that have shaped this borough across generations. How is heritage and belonging lived, performed, negotiated, and sometimes fought for in real time in Hackney?
These talks were followed by an installation co-developed with Anton Spice, Katmovser, and Marvin Gerrald as part of the social gathering.
INSTALLATION
‘Dissolving’
Milica Božić & Marvin Gerrald (June 2026)
A LiDAR scan of Metamorphika Gallery is pulled apart. The building, a former print workshop, found in ruin, inserted between two adjacent structures, sees its walls, its voids, its accumulated traces of materiality form into a cloud of points. In the animation, these points dissolve and reform, revealing what the walls hold and conceal. The inside opens outward. The outside folds in.
‘Overrunning’
Anton Spice
Duration: 33 mins 40 seconds (June 2026)
The first Hackney Half Marathon took place on 22nd June 2014. The following month, Hackney registered what remains its highest ever annual house price inflation, up 27.5% from the previous year.
‘Overrunning’ is an ambient sound work produced for Heritage Coexistence that explores the slow and often imperceptible changes that take place in the gentrification of a neighbourhood. Featuring a durational field recording of the Hackney Half marathon on 17th May 2026, recorded on the pavement outside Metamorphika gallery, it uses the event as a lens through which to question notions of individualism, community and redevelopment in a borough which, twelve years on from the first race, has one of the widest income inequality gaps in the UK. Heard in the subtle warping of the soundscape, ‘Overrunning’ is a gesture towards documenting urban change as a sonic process, where shifts in social and economic realities distort and recompose the built environment.
‘Unselfing’
Katmovser (June 2026)
An installation consisting of artefacts, found objects, and artworks that form a fragmented narrative about the denial of access and anomalies emerging from methods of navigating mazes of doorkeepers standing before the law. Some of the items and works installation consist of are:
No Sleep, a large work on paper completed in September 2025 at Colverstone school studio in Dalston, along with I Inner City, a contemplation on boundaries of self, identity formation based on history and future prospects, and joyful imaginations that celebrate humans as part of natural ecosystems. Colverstone school is a significant heritage site Katmovser briefly inhabited in 2025.
Innocence, a Teddy bear toy hand-painted by Katmovser, was found inside a billionaire-owned property in South London, which was squatted by the Autonomous Winter Shelter, an anarchist project that houses rough sleepers during winter. Bruised veil of this world is a piece of fabric used to separate an open space in the Autonomous winter shelter; the metal sheets come from Lesnes estate, an iconic brutalist housing project scheduled for demolition; they were covering an empty flat to prevent its occupation.
The installation weaves together layers of personal experience with structural disasters and dysfunctions, and a playful approach to facing adversarial forces.
special thanks to participants:
Edward Hollis
Simon Ballester
Katmovser
Nina Jang
Colin Priest
Cynthia Gilbert
INSTALLATION
‘Dissolving’
Milica Božić & Marvin Gerrald
‘Overrunning’
Anton Spice
‘Unselfing’
Katmovser
photography by:
Baris