Speaking Futures
WIP: Sharing Space with Joshua Woolford
Institute of Contemporary Arts x 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning
13 May, 2025
As part of the year-long residency at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), we are collaborating with the ICA and the 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning (198 CAL) based in Brixton on a series of work in progress performances and work sharing. WIP: Sharing Space highlights the importance of seeing work that is unfinished and still in transition, and celebrates dialogue and collaboration, inviting feedback from the audience and conversation between the artists. For each session, creatives from the ICA and the 198 CAL are paired with a Diasporas Now artist to encourage skill-sharing, mentorship and collaboration for young artists.
The first session in the series was led by Joshua Woolford, a transdisciplinary artist working between performance, painting, sculpture, sound, video, and installation. Woolford facilitated and collaborated with emerging artists Martha Tesfamicael, Juan Pablo Cifuentes from the ICA and artist MARIA (Maria Joranko) from the 198 CAL on an evening showcasing work in the process of being made.
Diasporas Now x ICA programmes are in media partnership with AnOther Magazine.
About Artists
Joshua Woolford
Joshua Woolford is a transdisciplinary artist working between performance, painting, sculpture, sound, video, and installation. Their work is rooted in cultural research, drawing from literature, music, and art, as well as their own personal experiences of being a member of the queer Black Afro-Caribbean diaspora living in England. Alongside their artistic practice, Joshua takes on design commissions and lectures at both UAL (London College of Communication) and the Royal College of Art (School of Architecture).
Juan Pablo Cifuentes
Juan Pablo Cifuentes is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist based in Manchester. He creates live performances, videos, and visual art that explore themes of memoir, identity, and power structures as they relate to objects and spaces.
He employs minimalist concepts and set designs to reinterpret modern Western depictions of male identity by disrupting objects and sociopolitical dynamics on stage. His work centers on the connection between design and performance, where objects build and transform identity through the reinterpretation of their ontological values and semiotics within space. Incorporating photography and filmmaking, he seeks to explore the liminality of social politics, including the dynamics of gaze, tribes, traditions, and memory. By traversing fiction and autobiographical material, he reflects on how our contemporary ways of relating and living are often mediatized by larger political issues.
MARIA
MARIA (b. Pierre, SD, USA) is a high-femme Latine/American writer, performer and artist who moonlights as a karaoke host. She builds and writes sculptural installations, performances, video and sound that eviscerate and reassemble the intersections of solidarity, chronic illness, race and their respective cosmologies in relation to speculative worlds. By using herself and the body with its endless potentials and failures as a conduit and muse she shatters through mediums to reflect the shifting nature of self-growth and conceptions of reality. She combines and oscillates between natural and digital materials to engineer and imagine radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks as sites for liberatory seeds. MARIA nurtures these by diving headfirst into exploring pain (bodily, emotional, communal, spiritual) and its possibilities as a grounding for transformation and transmutation.
MARIA was formerly based in Columbus, OH and while there, was a member of MINT Collective. Currently she is based in London, UK and has completed her MFA from Goldsmiths with Distinction (2022) and is the 2023 recipient of the Goldsmiths Award|Acme Early Career Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally with shows i know itโs the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery at CCAD and #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio in NYC and Oracles and Algorithms at Copperfield Gallery (2022). She also has recently opened shows in 2024 at Kupfer Projects and Studio Chapple (solo). Her work will be seen next at Cynefin in Athens and Rally Music Festival.