Re/Wave originates from the exhibition Xuly Bët: Funkin’ Fashion Factory at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and the longstanding practice of designer Xuly Bët. Since the early 1990s, Xuly Bët has worked with reuse, reconstruction, improvisation, and existing garments long before concepts such as upcycling or circular fashion entered mainstream discourse.

Building on this perspective, Re/Wave asks what fashion can reveal when understood not as a finished product, but as a system of materials, labour, knowledge, migration, and cultural exchange.

Bringing together designers, artists, researchers, makers, educators, and cultural practitioners from Europe and West Africa, the project explores how textiles move through global systems of production, second-hand economies, repair, and transformation. Rather than presenting sustainability solely as an environmental challenge, Re/Wave approaches it as a cultural, social, and economic question shaped by multiple forms of knowledge and lived experience.

Reflection

Assemblage Journal Vol. 3

August 2026

The Journal opens the project and establishes its editorial framework.

Through interviews, conversations, visual essays, material studies, and research contributions, it explores how textiles circulate through systems of knowledge, labour, value, repair, and transformation. Rather than documenting the symposium, the publication develops the project’s central questions through five interconnected editorial stories.

Encounter

International Symposium

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg × Assemblage

December 2026

Developed by Assemblage in collaboration with the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, the symposium brings together designers, artists, researchers, filmmakers, musicians, educators, and cultural practitioners to examine fashion as a cultural ecosystem shaped by material, labour, migration, identity, and circulation.

Rather than focusing on garments as finished objects, the programme explores the infrastructures and relationships that produce them: global supply chains, second-hand economies, repair practices, diasporic cultural production, and embodied forms of material knowledge.

Across two days, the symposium moves from analysing contemporary textile systems towards collective material practice, creating a space for dialogue, exchange, and experimentation.

Film Programme

Developed in collaboration with Abaton Kino, the accompanying film programme expands the symposium through documentary and fiction films exploring fashion, migration, material cultures, second-hand economies, and urban life.

Transformation

Educational Workshops

UDK × Assemblage

November 2026

Building on the conversations initiated through the Journal and Symposium, the workshops translate reflection into collective material practice.

Developed with students, designers, and institutional partners, they explore repair, reuse, material experimentation, and collaborative making as methods for generating new forms of knowledge and exchange.