In the third episode of our Zoomcast and podcast, The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond talks to queer curator, dj, club organiser and influencer Ryan Lanji
Ryan Lanji has tattoos in all the right places – and probably some of the wrong ones, especially if you are Ryan’s mum.
Ryan is a queer curator, dj, club organiser – more on the fabled Hungama later – archivist, influencer and all-round Instagram personality with his own show and a pretty massive following. But when it comes to his mum, Ryan is simply, well… Ryan – but no tattoos darling! Or that’s the impression I got when I interviewed him for my latest outing of Back to the F**Kture, the podcast and Zoomcast where I put fellow futurenauts on the spot about how they forecast and engage with tomorrow.
It’s also about what they have learned from those great forecasting faux pas all of us make now and then. I wanted my show with Ryan to be different – and true to Ryan, he wasn’t just different, he was brilliantly so.
First up, I didn’t want a forecaster, and he isn’t one in the strictest sense, but rather one of those innovators that bring tomorrow into being, ‘capture the zeitgeist’, as I once overheard somebody at Dalston Superstore describe him, while the rest of us watch and learn from him in terms of what’s new and what’s next.
Consider his origins: he’s Canadian, he’s South Asian, he’s queer (mum, I think, didn’t like that one initially, but like all loving mums…), and he now lives in East London, where one fine night-into-late morning at The Glory, he founded Hungama, a mad, queer, glittering, wholly over the top Bollywood-meets-hip-hop, Hoxton-style living catwalk rave.
But it was also a curated space and notional concept that gave voice, vice and permission to a whole family of marginalised voices to rewrite the future as it could and should be for South Asian ‘trans, bi, lesbian, non-binary plus fuck you for daring to ask’ people who had enough of hiding from their mums, dads and friends in the shadows of their multi-modal cultural roots.
And yet, true to Ryan – and his queer curatorial sensibilities – the stars of what has been described as the ‘Indian Studio 54’ numbered among them two Polish witches – yep, look that one up on his Instagram feed.
