Diasporas Now’s residency at ICA has been a creative exercise in prototyping reciprocal methods of cultural production and dissemination. From collaborative research and development, curation, production, and real-time archiving, the residency has proposed alternatives to one-off institutional activations and Lates-style programming.

It asks: what might it mean for an institution to prioritise the long-term sustainability of cultural communities over short-term discovery, extraction, and visibility? Beyond commissioning, what forms of support can institutions offer artists through sustained space, time, knowledge exchange, and pastoral care?

Diasporas Now is a live art platform founded by RIEKO, Lulu Wang, and Paola Estrella in 2021 at the Royal College of Art. As the ICA’s current collective in residence, they are collaborating on the Speaking Futures programme – a yearlong series of talks, workshops and performances exploring artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future.

RIEKO is a Japanese-born artist and composer whose multidisciplinary practice is part of an ongoing mythological world-building project. Weaving ritual performance, experimental music, and collective healing workshops with curation and community building, her work prototypes alternative futures and cultural systems through oracular, artist-led intuition.

Lulu Wang is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist drawing inspiration from her heritage and digital subcultures to explore hybrid identities and connections across humanity and social relationships. Through sculpture making, installation, and immersive choreography, her practice revolves around visual work in collaboration with technology, fashion, and music.

Paola Estrella is an artist whose practice explores intimacy, identity, and belief, using speculative fiction to hold multiple worldviews together. Working at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, and technology, her work examines how meaning is formed and how we come to agree on what is real, allowing different registers of experience to meet without hierarchy.

Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) was established in the summer of 2018 and brings together a community of queer, trans and non-binary Black people and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Following in the legacies of sound system culture, “we wanted to learn, build and sustain a resource for our collective struggles.” The Black-led system, based in London, is available for community use to amplify and connect grassroots movements.

BULLYACHE is an artist duo founded in 2021 by Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel. They make live music videos for the stage: choreographing, directing and composing original works that merge music, avant-garde dance theatre and pop culture spectacle. Think Pina Bausch cosplaying as Dua Lipa—ballroom meets noise, exhaustive dance training meets media theory—distilled into radical, cutting-edge choreographic performance.

Furmaan Ahmed is a Glasgow-born, Pakistani-Scottish multidisciplinary image-maker and set designer known for visionary, mythological world-building across contemporary art, fashion and experimental music. Blending ancient symbolism with futuristic sensuality, Furmaan crafts immersive visual universes centring trans, queer and Global Majority experiences.

Helen Cammock lives and works in North Wales. Her practice spans film, photography, print, text, song and performance, and engages with historical and contemporary narratives around Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Moving fluidly across time and geography, her works often layer multiple voices and perspectives to explore the cyclical nature of history through poetic, visual and aural assemblage. She was awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2017 and was a joint recipient of the Turner Prize in 2019.

Ivan Michael Blackstock is a multidisciplinary creative from South London focused on politically engaged artistic expression. His work has been showcased internationally, including at Sadler’s Wells, 180 Studios, La Villette, Kampnagel and ITA.

Joshua Woolford is a transdisciplinary artist working across performance, painting, sculpture, sound, video and installation. Their work draws from cultural research and personal experience as a member of the queer Black Afro-Caribbean diaspora living in England.

Julianknxx is a poet, artist and filmmaker. Rooted in poetry and extending into performance, film, music and sculpture, his practice reflects on African histories and diasporic experience through layered, polyphonic storytelling.

Juan Pablo Cifuentes is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist based in London, working across performance, design, and film. His practice explores displacement and in-betweenness, examining how the body, understood as a performance territory, constructs presence as an act of self-containment within social codes embedded in space and objects. Through dramaturgy and moving image, he reconfigures this dynamic across formats, questioning how presence, time, and identity are represented and framed within mainstream media.

Miro Alleyne-McCarthy is a Bajan-British filmmaker and visual artist exploring myth, magic and temporal boundaries through digital experimentation.

RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective combining architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges and advance equitable visions for the built environment.

SERAFINE1369 is a dancer, artist and body-focused researcher working with dancing as philosophical and political practice — an intimate technology for transcendence within the hostile architectures of the metropolis.

Sofía Pomeroy Fernández is a performance artist from Spain whose practice interweaves psychology, movement research, video, installation and live performance, exploring non-belonging and femininity through the body as archive.