Diasporas Now are the London-based, avant-garde, world-building collective reclaiming space through community and collaboration. They advocate for diverse discourses and methodologies around representation, giving total autonomy to all of the artists they invite into their community—free from the usual pressures to perform specific identities and narratives for institutional gatekeepers. They open the door, take up space, and share the spotlight—to inspire, to heal, and to celebrate multicultural lineages together.
Founded by multidisciplinary artists RIEKO (Rieko Whitfield), Lulu Wang, and Paola Estrella in 2021 at the Royal College of Art, Diasporas Now are a live art group and cultural agency championing artists of Global Majority backgrounds across art, music, dance, fashion, and beyond. They aim to produce and create art fearlessly—even if the infrastructure doesn’t yet exist. Each member’s mission is rooted in legacy and putting work into the world with pure intention, drawing on their cross-industry experiences:
“Our entire team has experience working in other fields like creative strategy and design, prior to becoming full-time artists. Everyone will tell you it’s difficult to be an artist, but when you know this is your life’s purpose, it’s arguably more difficult to not pursue it. Being an artist is certainly never straightforward, but if you take the leap, your unique path appears. Diasporas Now illuminates an amalgamation of these paths, not just for us but for all of the artists we work with.”
This ethos came to life last summer in 2025 with their debut collaborative project Sounding Futures at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Working remotely across continents, Diasporas Now and collaborator Joshua Woolford developed the performance from conception to execution—spanning choreography, songwriting, composition, dramaturgy, and spoken word. They brought in guest collaborators including cellist Abi Asisa and set designer Furmaan Ahmed, eventually coming together in person for two days to build the set, rehearse in the ICA theatre, and present the final work to a live audience.
During the performance, they documented the process by filming one another and projecting the footage live on stage—creating an archive in real time. Both the performance and the accompanying panel invited audiences to think beyond conventional parameters of performance art, positioning the collaborative process itself as central to the work. In doing so, they created space to deconstruct and champion collective methodologies within an art world that often defaults to individualism.
Diasporas Now have consistently demonstrated that they not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. They highlight the value of “owning cultural infrastructure as a form of artistic sovereignty and sharing the opportunities we create with artists we admire.” During their year-long residency at the ICA, they co-envisioned the public programme with curator Hannah Geddes as a more sustainable, artist-centred alternative to one-off institutional events or museum “Lates.” Their approach looks beyond the present—actively prototyping how institutions and creative communities can work together through long-term, mutually beneficial exchange.
On 7 March, Diasporas Now concluded their final artist takeover at the ICA, bringing together the artists they had collaborated with throughout the residency. The event featured live performances, discussions, and works from visionaries including Julianknxx, Black Obsidian Sound System, BULLYACHE, Helen Cammock, Ivan Michael Blackstock, SERAFINE1369, RESOLVE Collective, alongside RIEKO, Lulu, Paola, Joshua, and Furmaan, as well as young creatives mentored through their ICA Creatives collaboration. The evening stood as a culmination of their year-long programme, centred on shared space, experimentation, and collective energy.
One thing INTROE has established is that this collective has serious foresight:
“We are also taking Diasporas Now global by expanding outside of the U.K., while continuing to nurture our local and national networks. Our vision of the future of culture is decentralised, nodal, nomadic, and mycelial.”
An incubator for new discourses, rituals, and worlds across cultural backgrounds and disciplines, they continue to urge:
“For the love of grassroots culture put down your phones, get together in person, and be radical in your humanness. Dance, sweat, laugh, cry, and hold space for empathy, diverse perspectives, and complex conversations. Show support for your community not as a marketing buzzword, but as a daily lived practice.”
What remains is not just the memory of a final takeover, but a blueprint—one that continues to ripple outward as Diasporas Now expand their practice beyond the UK while deepening the communities they’ve already built.
