Diasporas Now
Image courtesy of Yiling Zhao
Diasporas Now is a London-based live art platform founded in 2021 by Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella and Lulu Wang at the Royal College of Art. They are currently in residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts programming talks, workshops and performances exploring artists as catalysts for alternative futures.
Rieko Whitfield is a Japanese-American artist and composer whose multidisciplinary practice is part of an ongoing mythological and propositional world-building project. Weaving ritual performance, experimental music, collective healing workshops, curating, and community organising, her work prototypes alternative futures and cross-industry cultural infrastructures grounded in diversity, equity, and artist-guided intuition. She has self-released music through Diasporas Now as her label.
Lulu Wang is a London-based Chinese interdisciplinary artist. She draws 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 new technologies, fashion, and experimental music.
Paola Estrella is a multimedia artist from Mexico based in London. Her work shifts across painting, video, installation, and performance, with speculative fiction serving as a core element of her practice. Estrella delves into the impact of new technologies on public and private spheres, examining how the imaginary shapes social conventions, identity, and our notion of reality. Her interest lies in the intricate tensions and complexities of belief systems and worldviews, the intersection of imagination and perception in relation to transcendent experiences.