Diasporas Now: Macrocosmic Futures

Diasporas Now, in partnership with Spike Island, the V&A, South London Gallery and Primary, selected six Global Majority artists working in live art through an open call for a national tour of commissioned performances under the theme of Macrocosmic Futures.

In the second iteration of the Diasporas Now Tour, Spike Island are delighted to host three commissioned performances by artists Hannan Jones, Emma Korantema and Hongxi Li, who will explore alter egos, deep time, and deep listening: a journey from Black philosophical and Sino-capitalist critique, through musique concrète into club driven catharsis. Following the performances, a DJ set will end the night and a bar is available for refreshments.

Schedule:

6.30pm – Performance by Hongxi Li (25 minutes)
7.15pm – Performance by Hannan Jones (45 minutes)
8.15pm – Performance by Emma Korantema (45 minutes)
9pm – DJ set (DJ to be announced)

About Macrocosmic Futures:
Diasporas Now’s 2025-2026 tour theme Macrocosmic Futures combines ancestral practices with new technologies as tools of divination toward preferred futures – rescripting interconnected narratives from the microcosm of our embodied realities to the macrocosm of our political and ecological landscapes.

Drawing from the framework of Afrofuturism and speculative fiction, Macrocosmic Futures widens the scope to pan-diasporic, pre-colonial perspectives – how can we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to more-than-human consciousness, when we centre values outside the historical trajectories of colonialism and capitalist extraction? What rituals can we co-create as future ancestors in the face of planetary transformation?

About Diasporas Now:

Diasporas Now is a live art community and cultural agency that champions artists of the Global Majority through collaborative performance incubation, institutional residencies, curated programming, and alternative arts education.

For more information on Diasporas Now, visit diasporasnow.com

Diasporas Now: Macorcosmic Futures is supported by the Arts Council England

HANNAN JONES

Hannan Jones is an artist of Algerian and Welsh origin raised on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, Western Australia, based in Glasgow. Research-led and process driven, she practices at the intersections of moving-image, installation and sound. Jones deep-dives into concepts of hybridity, language, and rhythms that are associated with cultural and social migration, and psychogeography.

Sonically, Jones’ approach is rooted in improvisation, electronics, music concrète, and analogue recordings. Using samples and layering of audio material to create alternate possibilities, reclaim parallel histories, and reimagine connections between them.

In 2023 she became an Oram Award awardee. Previous presentations include A Frontier in Depth, Artes Mundi and the National Roman Legion Museum, Caerleon (2025); Relay, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2025); Listening Session: Reimagining In Conversation, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2025); Counterflows, Glasgow (2023); Surface bounce and cycles, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh (2022) and Tate Lates, Tate Modern, London (2017). She has released on Optimo Music, 12th Isle, Weaponise Your Sound and in self-initiated pursuits.

EMMA KORANTEMA

Emma Korantema is a Ghanaian-British musician, writer and multidisciplinary artist from South London whose work moves between sound, philosophy and poetry. A former doctor, she uses music as an autobiographical form of inquiry into the body, power and liberation, exploring how sound can reveal and rewire human experience and healing.

Her project and debut album, The Complete Works 001 - Egya (2025) forms a sonic manifesto and capitalist critique that merges electronic composition, poetic narrative and philosophical reflection to ask what it means to remain human in an age of digital transhumanism. Rooted in Black philosophy and intuitive composition, her process transforms memory and emotion into sound, blurring the lines between theory, storytelling and ritual.

HONGXI LI

Hongxi Li is a London-based Chinese artist whose sculptural and performance work examines human behaviour shaped by social conditions, with a focus on post-communist and Sino-capitalist frameworks. Her practice interrogates how power structures, territorial control, and systemic ideologies shape the emotional and physical body.

Li deconstructs and re-narrates ready-made forms — from furniture to architectural elements — rebelling against, co-opting, or exposing the systems she critiques. Her sculptures act as material propositions of structural critique, while her performances, often collaborative or channelled through the artist’s East Asian fictional persona Jolene, activate these forms through gestures that draw from the legacy of happenings.

Li was named one of Artnet’s “5 Emerging Performance Art Stars to Know in 2025”. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and an MA in Cultural Entrepreneurship from Goldsmiths, and is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. Recent projects include Heaven Green (2024) at Neven Gallery, London, and a commission with Rimowa, Travel Light (2022).

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