Diasporas Now co-founders Rieko, Lulu Wang and Paola Estrella speak to AnOther as they prepare to host an evening of “alchemy and ritual” at the ICA next week
The ICA has announced the latest instalment of its Speaking Futures programme – an invigorating series of performances, workshops, and talks launched in April and continuing through to March 2026. Speaking Futures aims to break the boundaries between live art and other disciplines, offering fresh perspectives on timely themes such as technology, nature, and identity.
Taking place over the course of one evening on July 9, this iteration, Sounding Futures, marks the first live collaborative performance by Diasporas Now co-founders – Rieko, Lulu Wang and Paola Estrella – alongside a slew of special guest artists.
Diasporas Now was founded in 2021 as an experimental live-streaming platform run by artists Rieko, Wang, and Estrella after they graduated from the RCA. Since then, it has expanded into in-person events that support rising artistic talent, many of which have taken place at major institutions such as the V&A and Turner Contemporary. The trio are all currently in residence at the ICA.
“This is our first time collaborating as a collective, whereas before we were known for creating an infrastructure for other artists,” says Rieko. “We are thinking of ourselves more as a ritual incubator, coming together from different diasporic backgrounds. We have also invited Joshua Woolford to be part of the evening, who was one of the artists we had from our very first events. Furmaan Ahmed is doing visual direction, set design and photography. Abi Asisa is going to accompany us with cello compositions. We started by asking ourselves, What does diaspora mean to us? What do we want to stand for?”
The performances will see a mingling of the group’s individual practices – Rieko is a Japanese-born artist and composer whose work explores mythological world building; Lulu Wang is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist interested in how digital subcultures shape our experiences of connection; and Paola Estrella also works across several media, from painting to performance, exploring identity through forms of speculative fiction.
“When it comes to the performance, we’re trying to find these spaces where our understandings of identity crossover,” says Estrella. “A huge part of the performance involves a nurturing of ancestral practices, then bridging that with new technologies and contemporary ways of understanding identity today.”
In an effort to rethink how performance art is documented and preserved for future generations, the trio will film each other performing, live-stream the event, and create a digital archive where it can continue to exist. The evening will conclude with a panel discussion exploring the future of live art and the role of community archives.
Looking beyond the evening, the three are hoping the Speaking Futures programme for their year-long residency might serve as a blueprint to rethink the ways emerging artists and institutions interact. “When artists are working with institutions, we often hear that the power dynamic is quite uneven – that artists can only take what they are offered, and they sometimes lack the resources to ask for more,” says Wang. “We need something more sustainable that goes beyond the one-off showcase. We hope our work serves as a prototype for a new structure.”
They hope the evening will be a chance to share these ideas with a wider community. “We are living through an incredibly fractured time, and it is crucial to bring people into a room together, away from social media algorithms and news cycles, and remind people how to feel,” they say. “From a spiritual standpoint, we hope visitors can understand the importance of the role that artists play within society, especially in a moment of so much social, geopolitical, and ecological upheaval. We need artists to guide the way forward.”
Find out more about the Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now events programme at ICA in London here. The third event, Sounding Futures, will take place on 9 July 2025. Book tickets here.
