Diaspora Wonderland. Fashioning Worlds is an exhibition initiated by Lotfi Aoulad through Das Relais, a curatorial platform exploring the intersections of fashion and art, communities and well-being.
Through monumental textile works, community-based embroidery, immersive music experiences, photography and modular sculptural installations, the exhibition reveals fashion as more than garment-making. Fashion becomes a narrative medium — a place of existence. It tells the world who we are and may carry a prophetic function, sensing the transformations shaping our present.
Jacques Attali once wrote that noise is a form of violence, while music is prophecy: by listening to it, one might foresee the future of societies. What if fashion carried a similar power? Dressing would then become an instinctive gesture, a way of sensing the present, preparing for what lies ahead, and daring to inhabit one’s existence.
Conceived as a circular exhibition travelling across fashion hubs, Diaspora Wonderland brings together a generation of artists from diasporic communities who express their creativity through fashion, textiles, visual arts, music and installation.
At its core, the exhibition examines how stories travel across bodies, territories and generations. Born from experiences of exile, transmission and reinvention, the works explore memory, heritage and collective imagination. The notion of “diaspora”, from the Greek speiro, “to sow”, is approached not merely as dispersion, but as a site of creation. From tension and displacement emerge new cultural landscapes: new “wonderlands” , open to all. Participating artists include German-Nigerian designer Buki Akomolafe, Franco-Moroccan artist Margaux Derhy, visual artist and rapper Nix from Senegal, Franco-Algerian photographer Sarah Makharine, and the Franco-Moroccan artist and fashion designer Sophia Kacimi, based in London. Their practices intersect craftsmanship, fashion design, moving image, sound and installation.
Berlin serves as a resonant context for this iteration. A city shaped by rupture, reconstruction, and multiplicity, it offers fertile ground for experimental fashion practices rooted in diasporic experience.
Jacques Attali once wrote that noise is a form of violence, while music is prophecy: by listening to it, one might foresee the future of societies. What if fashion carried a similar power? Dressing would then become an instinctive gesture, a way of sensing the present, preparing for what lies ahead, and daring to inhabit one’s existence.
Conceived as a circular exhibition travelling across fashion hubs, Diaspora Wonderland brings together a generation of artists from diasporic communities who express their creativity through fashion, textiles, visual arts, music and installation.
At its core, the exhibition examines how stories travel across bodies, territories and generations. Born from experiences of exile, transmission and reinvention, the works explore memory, heritage and collective imagination. The notion of “diaspora”, from the Greek speiro, “to sow”, is approached not merely as dispersion, but as a site of creation. From tension and displacement emerge new cultural landscapes: new “wonderlands” , open to all. Participating artists include German-Nigerian designer Buki Akomolafe, Franco-Moroccan artist Margaux Derhy, visual artist and rapper Nix from Senegal, Franco-Algerian photographer Sarah Makharine, and the Franco-Moroccan artist and fashion designer Sophia Kacimi, based in London. Their practices intersect craftsmanship, fashion design, moving image, sound and installation.
Berlin serves as a resonant context for this iteration. A city shaped by rupture, reconstruction, and multiplicity, it offers fertile ground for experimental fashion practices rooted in diasporic experience.