In a pop-up exhibition, GROUP50:50 provides insight into its research and invites several guests of the WAX ENCOUNTERS to display related materials and works. The exhibition includes the installation FUNTUNFUNEFU DENKYEMFUNEFU by Percy Nii Nortey, documentary pictures and a short film by Koffi Amankwa and Austin Nortey, an installation A PERSONAL AFFAIR DIGGING TO REMEMBER FORWARD by Dunja Herzog, a video by Henry Desouza Nelson and Eva-Maria Bertschy and sketches for the WAX COLLECTION by Austin Nortey and Elia Rediger. 

Friday 17:30 - 18:00

Prince Toffa is a visual artist and performer who lives and works in Benin. Initially a fashion designer, he forged his own artistic identity alongside his peers. Struck by the waste piling up on 

the coast, he assembles different types of waste to form impressive costume-like works that symbolically evoke the Vodùn deities. He brings them to life in urban performances that create a dialogue between his ancestral traditions and the contemporary world, where environmental issues and climate change leave no one indifferent. For his artistic intervention opening WAX ENCOUNTERS, he will wear a large Honon costume and make an introduction to the history and meanings of wax prints in his country. 

Moderation: Edwige Dro 

The history of the production and distribution of European-made ‘African wax prints’ in West Africa allows us to better understand Swiss colonial history and its consequences. The Basel Mission’s Trading Company was founded in 1859 with the aim of providing clients with all kinds of goods from Switzerland and importing raw materials such as cocoa, palm oil and cotton to Switzerland in return. Over time they became a key distributor of the Swiss textile industry. Their growing economies allowed especially the wealthier customers to demand more prestigious and exclusive cloth, especially batik imitations, printed on both sides of the cloth with real wax. Far from passive recipients of a colonial commodity, African clients expressed their discerning taste for quality and design. Their wishes were communicated by the Swiss missionaries, setting the terms of the trade in ways that unsettled European merchants. Wax prints tell a story of colonial commodity, that with the help of African patronage, Swiss missionaries’ and European economic interests changed the history of dress in Africa. 

Helen Elands works as an independent researcher on the history of textile design. Her research centers on the European production and export of wax prints to West-Africa from its beginnings around 1890 until today, having worked extensively in the archives of the Swiss, Dutch and British ‘African Wax Prints’ producers. She discusses the role of the Basel trading company in the distribution of wax prints and its collaboration with local traders and customers, who have been involved in designing the prints from the beginnings. 

Austin Nortey is a fashion designer from Kumasi (Ghana), founder of Nakus Brand, moving between the worlds of fashion and art, and is currently designing the costumes for WAX TRADERS. Austin will reflect on his and his family’s relation with the Presbytarian Church of Ghana, founded by the Basel Mission. He talks about the many connections he discovered during his research for WAX TRADERS between the colonial history of his church and the fabrics his mother worked with when she was a tailor. 

Dunja Herzog is a visual artist who currently lives and works between Basel, Lagos and Johannesburg. Her work is influenced by the effects of colonial history on personal narratives, bodies and materials, which come together in mindful and poetic installations. She will speak about her watchmaker family’s ties with UTC and its department store in Lagos. 

Monika Gintersdorfer / La Fleur is a director and co-founder of Gintersdorfer/Klaßen and the transnational dance and theatre collective LA FLEUR. They have been creating performances between Germany, Côte d’Ivoire, Mexico and other countries for decades and have toured half the world. With LA FLEUR she did research on the history of the textile factory Robert Gonfreville in Bouaké (Côte d’Ivoire). It was founded in 1921 beneath the French colonial reign and until its closure in 2015 employed many workers living in the same area as Gintersdorfer herself. She will show a film made during this research and comment on it. 

Moderation: Eva-Maria Bertschy 

UTC exported not only textiles and sewing machines to West Africa, but also records and gramophones. Like other trading companies in the colonial context, UTC responded to the demand of the consumers to have their music recorded and distributed. This resulted in an archive that reflects the various musical styles in Ghana and Nigeria between the 1930s and 1950s, from church hymns to palm wine music to highlife and many more. When the trading company seized to operate in the 1990s, a large number of shellac records was transferred to the archives of the Basel Mission. During the listening session, we hear music from this collection and learn about the various influences of colonial trade, mission and migration on the emergence of West African popular music, which, like wax prints, arose from the encounter between local cultures and the culture of the colonial rulers. The archived music will be commented on by the guitar of Congolese musician Kojack Kossakamvwe. This creates an encounter between archived and living music that moves with people across continents. 

Serena Owusua Dankwa is a gender studies scholar and lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Basel. She does research at the crossroads of academic and artistic forms of knowledge production with a special focus on queer, blackfeminist and postcolonial concepts of gender, friendship and intimacy. During her work as a journalist with the Swiss radio and television SRF and the broadcast “Musik der Welt” she obtained access to the UTC music archive and began to make it accessible to the public. 

Veit Arlt is the Executive Secretary of the Centre for African Studies Basel and in this function coordinates the Master's program African Studies. He did his studies in History and Geography at the University of Basel and in 2005 earned his PhD with a thesis on the history of Ghana. With Serena Dankwa he digitized parts of the UTC music archive in order to make it available in its country of origin. They produced the CD «Ghana Popular Music 1931−1957 which they launched in Ghana in 2002. 

Kojack Kossakamvwe is a composer and guitarist from Kinshasa (DR Congo) and musical director of WAX TRADERS. The composition of the piece starts out from recordings of West African pop music stored in the archives of the Basel Mission. During the listening session he will comment on the west african music with his guitar, talking about church hymns and highlife. Like the Congolese rumba, these have emerged from the encounter between the music of the colonial elites and traditional African rhythms. 

Moderation: Eva-Maria Bertschy 

How do we deal with a colonial heritage that has become part of everyday life and popular culture? In West Africa, wax prints are not only essential fashion elements, but also means of communication – many designs carry messages that vary from region to region, some are designed for political campaigns or special celebrations such as weddings and funerals. The most important role in the passing on of traditions have always had market vendors and textile traders such as the Togolese Nana Benz, who gave each design a name. However, the use and traditions regarding wax prints are undergoing radical change in view of the fast pace of fashion, the flooding of the market with second-hand clothing and the Chinese production of wax fabrics and imitations, which dominate the market today. Only an infinitesimal part of Wax Prints is still produced locally, for example at Akosombo Textile Limited in Ghana. But also the producers of so-called Swiss and Austrian Lace that became popular in West Africa in the 60s are being surpassed by Asian competitors. Very few are the Swiss textile companies still holding up to the economic and administrative pressure of the global textile market. 

Edwige Dro is an author from Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) and founder of ‘1949 – La bibliothèque des écritures féminine d'Afrique et du monde noir’ (1949 – The Library of Women's Writing from Africa and the Black World). She is the co-author of the musical theatre piece WAX TRADERS. At the WAX ENCOUNTERS, she will tell the story of the Nana Benz from Lomé who made a fortune trading wax prints in the 1950s and 1960s, starting with the question whether these respected and extremely wealthy women were feminists. 

Percy Nii Nortey is a multidisciplinary artist from Kumasi (Ghana) who has been working on the history of textiles in Ghana for many years. He is the set designer for the musical theatre piece WAX TRADERS. At the WAX ENCOUNTERS he will talk about the second hand fabrics that flooded the west african market and the meanings of fabric for the local communities for the local communities with whom he has been working for many years: the farm workers, the market women, the tailors. He will explain the meaning of some of the Wax Print designs and how these textiles have come to form part of his work. 

Martin Schlegel worked in the African division of a textile manufacturer in eastern Switzerland until he took over the textile screen printing company TDS in Arbon, formerly a family-run business, in 2016. Schlegel specialises in unconventional materials and techniques and produces specific experimental textiles for haute couture companies, artists and architects, including TaDA – Textile and Design Alliance. In 2023, he was honoured with the Swiss Design Award for his work. He talks about the political decisions that led to the decline of the textile industry in eastern Switzerland, why the African business allowed it to stay alive for a while longer, and how a small textile company can still compete in the international market today. 

Moderation: Austin Nortey & Elia Rediger 

WAX Print Future Design is an open creative lab exploring covering as an act of resistance and survival. As part of the WAX COLLECTION, an eclectic fashion design project, we draw from the principles of Wax & Dye — a process of layering, masking, and revealing — participants collaboratively imagine a next generation of WAX prints as fabrics that tell future stories. Through additive narration and diffuse thinking, we use transparent foils, tracing paper, and pigments to experiment with visibility, opacity, and transformation. How can we protect, expose, and reinvent collective identity by means of design? 

Austin Nortey is a fashion designer from Kumasi (Ghana), founder of Nakus Brand, moving between the worlds of fashion and art, and is currently working on the costumes for WAX TRADERS as well as the WAX COLLECTION. Together with Elia Rediger, he envisioned the experimental Open Lab, completing the historical and contemporary topics of the different panels with a creative future perspective. 

Elia Rediger is a director, writer, composer, singer and multidisciplinary artist, born in Kinshasa, raised in Basel and based in Berlin. He was the frontman of the popular music group ‘The Bianca Story’ and is a cofounder of GROUP50:50. His fields of interest are as many as his artistic disciplines and as a result, he is always on the hunt for innovative formats and improbable encounters with new international collaborators. Together with Austin Nortey, he has invited Reindolf Amponsah Monnie (Ghana), a designer and collaborator of the WAX COLLECTION to participate in the Open Lab. 

Reindolf ‘Rein’ Amponsah Monnie is a textile designer and print artist based in Kumasi, Ghana. He studied at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), where he developed a focus on contemporary textile design and experimental print processes. His work engages with themes of cultural identity, materiality, and visual storytelling, and he regularly collaborates on projects that connect art, design, and education. At the WAX ENCOUNTERS Open Lab he will be live designing Wax Print visions for the future. 

Eva-Maria Bertschy, artistic co-director of WAX TRADERS and curator of the WAX ENCOUNTERS is a Basel based author and director. In her work she tells stories of global interconnections, through migration and trade. For the research on WAX TRADERS she has spent three months in Accra, Lagos and Abidjan, engaging with numerous professionals from diverse backgrounds. 

Co-curation and translation: Luca Maier

Production: Camille Jamet

Förderung: Fachausschuss Tanz & Theater Basel-Stadt / Basel Landschaft 

Produktion: GROUP50:50

Koproduktion: Kaserne Basel, Culturescapes und Vorarlberger Landestheater

Zusammenarbeit mit: 4TheKultur – Promoting and sharing the beauty and diversity of Black culture, TaDA – Textile and Design Alliance, Mission 21 / Archive of the Basel Mission, Museum of Cultures Basel, Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel.