In 1989 a Berlin-based artist sewed loudspeakers into a ballet tutu. The question nobody asked at the time was how long it would keep working.
The answer, it turns out, is at least 37 years. While clearing his archive near Berlin, Benoît Maubrey uncovered 32 Audio Tutus spanning generations of the work — from 1989 to the present — and reports that all of them are fully functional. With a 12V 2Ah battery and a belt, they sing again.
On 31 October 2026, at the Repair & Share Festival in Wuppertal, a free public workshop will open them up.
What an Audio Tutu is
The Audio Ballerina series is not a costume with a speaker in it. Each Audio Tutu is described as a complete sound installation: built-in speakers, samplers, light-frequency controllers, preamplifiers, amplifiers and radio receivers. Put it on and movement, light and radio waves all become sound.
Maubrey — a German contemporary artist born in the United States — has worked with speakers, amplifiers, sensors and discarded electronics since the early 1980s, calling the results Electroacoustic Sculptures. His stated position is that the speaker is not a device but a material, “like wood or clay, that can shape bodies and spaces.”
That framing explains the longevity. A loudspeaker treated as a component gets replaced by a better component; a loudspeaker treated as marble gets kept.
The workshop
The session is called “Repair & Re-sound: Give an Audio Ballerina a Second Life”, co-organised with CSCP / Fab Region Bergisches Städtedreieck, and it runs in four stages:
- Check-up — listen closely to find out what sonic abilities the skirt still holds
- Diagnosis — identify the circuits and components that need repair
- Repair & Upgrade — restore the original electronic structure, then add new connectivity
- Resound — put the skirt on and let the audience hear the upgraded old voice
No hardware knowledge and no programming experience is required, and Maubrey will be on site in person. The new connectivity comes from Seeed’s reSpeaker and XIAO series.
The ordering is the interesting part, and it is the right way round. Listen first, diagnose second, and only then touch anything. A 1989 electroacoustic sculpture whose fault you have not characterised is a thing you can easily finish off by replacing the wrong board — the archival instinct and the maker instinct pull in opposite directions here, and the workflow puts the archival one first.
The event
| Date | Saturday 31 October 2026, 11:00–17:00 |
| Venue | Utopiastadt, Mirker Straße 48, 42105 Wuppertal |
| Organiser | Fab Region (Bergische Stadtentwicklung) |
| Funding | EU and the NRW Ministry of Environment |
| Admission | Free; registration via Eventbrite |
| Theme | ”Dein Tag zum Entdecken, Selbermachen und Weiterlieben” |
The festival is part of European Circular Week and is billed as the climax of a repair world-record attempt across North Rhine-Westphalia through October. Alongside the Audio Ballerina workshop there are repair sessions, exhibitions, a second-hand swap, vintage fashion and a Reparatur-Café XXL. The standing invitation is to bring one beloved broken item.
The day before, 30 October, the Fab City Gathering takes place at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, bringing together city representatives and makers from the global Fab City network.
Two further Seeed-run workshops are on the programme, both on the same theme: “Vibe Coding with Wio Terminal: New Life for Old Hardware”, and “Off-Grid Communication with Meshtastic: Community Resilience in Action”. German-language support is available throughout.
Why this is not just a repair story
Maubrey’s SPEAKERS ARENA — a public sound stage built from 400 speakers that anyone can plug into and play — won the Fab City Awards 2026 in the Technology category. In that project, Seeed’s reCamera and reRouter added network connectivity and live video streaming so remote participants could join the performance. Maubrey’s assessment: “The Seeed technology was outstanding and essential for this artwork.”
The Wuppertal collaboration inverts that. SPEAKERS ARENA used new hardware to extend a new work outward onto the network; the Audio Tutu repair uses new hardware to extend an old work forward in time. Seeed’s own framing is that instead of connecting to the internet, they are “plugging back into a 30-plus-year-old artwork.”
The question underneath
The genuinely uncomfortable question the project raises is in Seeed’s write-up, and it is not really about tutus: how long can an electronic artwork actually live?
Media art has a conservation problem that oil painting does not. Many discarded devices fail only from an aging battery, a loose connector or one dead component — and the institutions that collect electronic work are increasingly holding pieces whose failure modes are trivially repairable and whose repair nobody is authorised to attempt. A 1989 work that still runs on a 12V battery is a best case, and it still needed somebody to go through an archive.
What the skirts will sound like afterwards is explicitly undecided. Seeed says there is no fixed answer yet — the artist’s innovation of 30 years ago will be shaped by whoever turns up willing to work on it. For a piece whose whole premise is that a wearer’s movement generates the sound, letting a room full of strangers determine the result is at least consistent.
Sources
- Seeed Studio × reTUTU: Rebuilding the Audio Ballerina in Wuppertal — Seeed Studio
- Benoît Maubrey — Electroacoustic Sculptures
- Repair & Share Festival — free registration on Eventbrite
- Audio Ballerinas teaser — Benoît Maubrey
- Utopiastadt, Wuppertal