Creative Europe programme
Project is a contribution to Creative Europe programme, set up by the European Commission, to support initiatives that seek to preserve, promote and develop the diversity of European cultural heritage. It is established through the common work of an international consortium formed by the association HS_Projets, the cooperative society Ideias Emergentes, the textile design studio Lottozero, the research institute Sächsische Textilforschungsinstitut e.V. and the Mykhailo Boychuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design.
These five entities are collaborating for three and a half years (from March 2026 to August 2029) on the Weave Up+ project, financed by the European Union programme. As a logical continuation of its first phase Weave Up!, which ran from 2023 to 2025, WUP+ reinvents the "Grand Tour" as a contemporary, itinerant, eco-friendly, and collaborative textile training experience. Through a series of journeys across Europe, the project reconnects designers and creators with the raw materials, innovative skills, recycling process, and European territories that shape textiles.
Based on the principles of slow travel, WUP+ encourages participants to slow down in order to better observe, understand, and experiment. Travel becomes a tool for research and creation, fostering encounters with artisans, producers, designers, and other stakeholders in the textile industry.
The five actors have chosen to work on natural fibres and recycling, which require multiple skills and knowledge. The project proposes 2 National Tours (2026 and 2027) per country, to discover the production chain and to improve one or two ecological skills of each of these topics.
The consortium
- HS_Projets (FR)
- Ideias Emergentes (PT)
- Lottozero (IT)
- Sächsische Textilforschungsinstitut (DE)
- Mykhailo Boychuk Kyiv State (UA)
HS_Projets is a French NGO founded in 2008, working towards textiles as its way to explore the world. It runs projects all year round at both local and international levels. It embraces collaboration, innovation and imagination, with people of all ages and carrying out initiatives across all sectors of society, including prisons, hospitals and the arts. Since 2012, HS_Projets association produces the Textile Biennial in Clermont-Ferrand and AuRA region in even-years, and in another country the odd-years.
Ideias Emergentesis a multidisciplinary platform founded in 2004 in Porto (Portugal), focusing on cultural and artistic production, museography, exhibition projects, cultural editions, and applied research in heritage and cultural tourism. It aims to stimulate communities, create new audiences, and enhance creative wealth and cultural diversity at local, national, and international levels. Since 2012, IE launched the Contextile, Contemporary Textile Art Biennial, focusing on contemporary artistic intervention and valuing Portugal's textile culture.
Lottozero is an international center for textile design, art and culture based in the historical Prato textile district and cluster. Lottozero was founded in Prato to initiate and boost the collaboration between design, research and industry, its work is aimed primarily at creative people operating in textiles, textile art and fashion.
STFI is a German non-profit research institute in the Free State of Saxony and continues the long tradition of Saxon textile research and textile industry. STFI's process- and product-related research covers both classical textile technologies and innovative technical solutions for a wide range of applications in nonwovens and technical textiles.
The academy started its work in 1938, as an art higher education institution, a strategically important institution in the context of state-building processes and the formation of Ukrainian identity, development of national art with a combination of experiments and innovations contemporary institution focused on education and culture at a national level, one of Ukraine's leading institutions of higher education, focused on the preserving, developing, popularizing of the national spiritual and cultural heritage while integrating it into works of modern art.