Finding the Ephemeral

Peckham's amazing Mirror Maze

Recently I ventured to Peckham. I didn’t go for any of Peckham’s many staple attractions, but for a mirror maze. Let me map out the timeline. I heard about it mid-week, from a major London travel site, and even then, I only had four days to go see it before it packed up. It usually takes me ages to get around to visiting anything on my list (it is a big list, to be fair), but this time I prioritised it, and I’m so glad I did. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have experienced the epic room that is Es Devlin’s Mirror Maze.

You can no longer go and see the mirror maze, but I can describe the experience of it to you. Imagine it like this:

Entrance was timed. Inside you sit. A massive projection documenting the project is played on the far wall. Once it is over, the projection illuminating the dark room with bright red swirls, you step through the oval doorframe, and into the mirror maze.
It gives the effect of a collage of moving instances. People move in and out of view, the colour of shirts and coats and bags copy over and over again. I can romanticize the room all I want, but if you hit the wrong angle, if the crowd moved a certain way – it suddenly seemed mediocre. Light could dazzle or it could fall flat.

You wander, up and down stairs made up of long, vertical mirrors, like each one is somehow different than the others. You wander, you try to get lost in a small space, try to be tricked by different versions of you, and find yourself in a projection room with red pastels bleeding into each other on all sides. You wander more, and you find the exit. There, you step into a red dream.

The fog machine doesn’t quite do the trick to obscure anything, but it does blur darker colours together; diffuses the red neon light. There’s nothing to this hallway, no mirrors, no installations, it’s just red. You don’t know why, but it feels like a secret. In the mirror maze, you could hear a quiet murmur of voices, but in this room, people are strangely silent. Like it is something sacred, or perhaps because the magic of the room seems to break when normality enters it.

You exit through another oval doorway, and you’re back in Peckham.

Cassandra Kosmayer

TripTide User