CASA: Lines of Flight

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. About the Diasporas Now team including RIEKO, Lulu Wang and Paola Estrella:

• 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.

Maria Joranko is a Guatemalan/American multimedia artist and vocalist based in London. She creates installations, performances, video and sound through merging digital and handdone processes. Deeply influenced by speculative worlds, storytelling, and the gothic, her oeuvre is characterized by a strong connection to the chthonic and political. 

Daniel Bernal Colombian-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, digital media and image-making. His practice combines material and digital experimentation with conceptual research informed by literature, philosophy, cinema and ethnographic methods. Through his work, he reflects on self-representation, socio-environmental concerns and gendered experience, while examining the structures that shape contemporary life.

HomeSick is a London-based collective founded by Tatiana Martinez, originally from El Salvador and Noor Nematt, from Jordan. Initially centred on curating exhibitions, the collective has since expanded its reach to include film screenings, interactive digital installations, and evenings of music and poetry, embracing a wide range of themes and artistic expressions. 

Dyana Gravina is an independent curator, cultural producer, interdisciplinary artist, activist, mover, birth worker and community builder. Founder director of Procreate Project (2013-present), an arts organisation supporting women and non-binary artists who are mothers/parents. Her  artistic and curatorial practices are interested in intersectional feminisms, migration, and body politics manifesting in a transdisciplinary body of work that combines writing, movement, actions, photography and video.