BEYOND FASHION
THERE IS NO AWAY - Fashion After Extraction
BEYOND FASHION
THERE IS NO AWAY
Fashion After Extraction
International Symposium
10–11 December 2026
ASSEMBLAGE x Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Fashion is never only about what we wear. It is shaped by materials, labour, knowledge, movement, and exchange — and by what happens to garments and textiles as they move between people and places.
BEYOND FASHION follows these movements and the tensions they reveal — between what is made and what remains, what is valued and what is discarded, and the power relations that shape what moves and what stays.
Taking its point of departure from the exhibition XULY.Bët – Funkin’ Fashion Factory 100% Recycled, curated by Bisrat Negassi, Head of the Fashion and Textiles Collection at MK&G, the symposium begins with the practice of Lamine Kouyaté, founder and designer of XULY.Bët, whose work transforms existing and discarded garments through upcycling, improvisation, and creative reuse.
Since the 1990s, XULY.Bët has connected fashion with music, urban culture, and diasporic networks, treating clothing not simply as a finished product, but as a material for transformation, cultural expression, and exchange.
From this starting point, the conversation expands to practices and perspectives from Europe and West Africa. How do textiles carry histories, knowledge, labour, care, and identity? And what happens when the boundaries between waste and resource, old and new, local and global begin to shift?
The symposium brings these questions into dialogue with the wider systems, histories, and relationships that shape fashion.
Programme
Three formats. One shared question: what happens to textiles when they move, change, and are transformed?
The programme brings together an international symposium, a journal , and educational workshops — bringing perspectives and practices from Europe and West Africa into conversation.
This is the approach Assemblage takes: creating space for reflection, encounter, and transformation — connecting people, practices, and perspectives across different contexts.
Symposium
Contributors
10–11 December 2026
13:30–17:30
ASSEMBLAGE × Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G)
The symposium brings together designers, artists, researchers, educators, social enterprises, and cultural practitioners from Europe and West Africa for two days of conversation, exchange, and making.
Across different places, contexts, and practices, the programme follows textiles through reuse and repair, second-hand economies, local production, cultural exchange, and material knowledge.
It also asks what kinds of knowledge, care, and labour are often overlooked within these systems — and how they might be made visible.
Across two days, conversation meets practice.
DAY 1
Textile Systems & Global Circulation
Day One begins with Lamine Badian Kouyaté, founder and designer of XULY.Bët, and the practice behind the work presented in the exhibition. Selected pieces, images, and archival material become a starting point for a conversation about how clothing moves — between bodies, places, histories, and uses.
From Hamburg, the perspective shifts to Accra and the global circulation of second-hand clothing. From there, the focus turns to value, reuse, and transformation, before arriving at questions of material practice and knowledge: what materials carry, what making can reveal, and whose knowledge shapes our understanding of fashion.
Bringing together perspectives and practices from Europe and West Africa, the symposium follows textiles as they move between contexts — changing their use, value, meaning, and possibilities along the way.
DAY 2
Material Practice & Collective Making
The second day brings these questions into practice.
What happens when we work with materials that already have a history?
Participants explore existing garments and textiles through collective making, repair, reuse, and local production.
Working together and locally, questions of circulation, value, labour, and transformation become material questions — opening up new ways of understanding what is already here and what it might become.
INTERESTED IN JOINING?
The symposium is primarily invitation-based. If you would like to attend, please register your interest.
Assemblage Journal BEYOND FASHION
The Journal brings together six stories that look at fashion through materials, movement, histories, and practices — asking what textiles carry, what they reveal, and what they can become.
Rather than documenting the project, the publication follows its questions through interviews, conversations, and visual essays.
Together, the contributions look at what happens to textiles as they move between people, places, and contexts — how their meanings change, what they leave behind, and what new possibilities emerge through different ways of working with them.
Digital Workshops
TRANSFORMATION
Educational Workshops
WHAT CAN TEXTILES BECOME?
The workshops extend the questions of BEYOND FASHION and the symposium into spaces of learning and making.
Developed in collaboration with design schools and universities, they create opportunities for material experimentation, repair, reuse, and collaborative practice.
Rather than following fixed solutions, the workshops use textiles as a starting point for exploration — inviting participants from different disciplines to test, adapt, make, and learn together.
