WAX COLLECTION operates as a brand, laboratory, and proposition: a transnational fashion network in which garments emerge through artistic research and collective authorship. Produced between Kumasi, Accra, Palermo, Paris, Berlin, and Basel, the label brings together artists, designers, and thinkers who approach fashion as a precise, conceptual medium. 

Everyone knows the colourful cotton fabrics we call ‘African wax prints’. But hardly anyone knows their colonial history. And who would have thought? Switzerland played an important role in spreading these fabrics in West Africa. In the mid-19th century, a Dutch company copied an Indonesian printing technique, and the Basel Mission's trading company created a market for it on the Gold Coast.

Everyone knows the colourful cotton fabrics we call ‘African wax prints’.
But hardly anyone knows their colonial history. And who would have thought? Switzerland played an important role in spreading these fabrics in West Africa. In the mid-19th century, a Dutch company copied an Indonesian printing technique, and the Basel Mission's trading company created a market for it on the Gold Coast. In talks, films and installations, designers, artists and researchers from Africa and Europe shed light on the colonial entanglement between Switzerland and West Africa over two centuries, focusing on the production and trade of colourful cotton fabrics. WAX ENCOUNTERS is the first part of a multifaceted theatre and fashion project by GROUP50:50.