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.
Avec « The Time For Denial Is Over – Decolonial Ecology », GROUP50:50 invite des artistes, des activistes et des chercheurs qui travaillent pour une écologie décoloniale à échanger autour de leurs pratiques. Comment faire face à la déception et à l'incertitude lorsque les solutions aux problèmes écologiques continuent de reproduire les mêmes inégalités ? Comment soutenir les personnes les plus exposées aux impacts du changement climatique et des désastres écologiques sans tomber dans des approches paternalistes néocoloniales ?
All members of GROUP50:50 met for a week in Berlin in November 2023 to talk. Conflicts, misunderstandings and injuries were discussed, organizational complications analyzed, structural and artistic visions developed. Yannick Useni Sikuzani (professor at the University of Lubumbahsi) and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard (activist, curator and publicist from Berlin) acted as mediators for the group.
We are entering a new era of postcolonial debate. In this context, GROUP50:50 and studio rizoma invite artists, activists and thinkers from Europe and Africa to set the foundations for a broad transnational restitution movement. In a series of lessons, pieces, and interventions we present and discuss artistic and political practices reframing transcontinental dialogue and cooperation.
We are entering a new era of postcolonial debate. In this context, GROUP50:50 and studio rizoma invite artists, activists and thinkers from Europe and Africa to set the foundations for a broad transnational restitution movement. In a series of lessons, pieces, and interventions we present and discuss artistic and political practices reframing transcontinental dialogue and cooperation.
In "The Ghosts Are Returning", GROUP50:50 tells the story of seven "pygmy skeletons" that a Swiss doctor brought from the Congo to Geneva in the 1950s. The artists from Congo, Switzerland and Germany travel to the equatorial forest to meet the nomadic Mbuti people who are threatened by illegal logging and driven out of their territories. Singing and dancing with them, they develop a ritual to allow the seven spirits to find rest. The result is a multimedia musical theater piece about (neo)colonial crimes, death and mourning.
We are entering a new era of postcolonial debate. In this context, GROUP50:50 and studio rizoma invite artists, activists and thinkers from Europe and Africa to set the foundations for a broad transnational restitution movement. In a series of lessons, pieces, and interventions we present and discuss artistic and political practices reframing transcontinental dialogue and cooperation.