The School of Mutants (SN/MR/FR)
Residency period: September-November 2024
instagram.com/theschoolofmutants
At La Becque, we have developed a new film and multimedia installation around a fictional encounter between legendary filmmakers Ousmane Sembene and Jonas Mekas. Both were born in the same week, at the end of 1922, both have lived through the political turmoil of the twentieth century and the adversity of the film industry. Each of them invented a cinematic language, driven by a relentless ideal of autonomy. Our work in progress is a search for witnesses and legacies of both artists. Through fictional and documented encounters, we explore the resonance of their work with the crises of the contemporary world. Do moving images still have political power? How can poetry and politics be articulated? How do artists define the means of their vision?
Our collective has also worked on several video and sound editing, and created a new series of ceramic pieces that will accompany the installation release of the film.
In addition, the residency at La Becque was also an opportunity for all the members of The School of Mutants to meet, share ongoing research and initiate new collaborative threads across a broad range of formats and media. — The School of Mutants
A nomadic collaborative art and research platform that involves artists, craftspeople, activists, theorists, and curators, The School of Mutants was Initiated in Dakar in 2018 by Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet Bottéro, and now includes Horacio Cadzco, Diane Cescutti, Lou Mo, Cromix Onana, Valérie Osouf and Boris Raux. Begun as an inquiry into the role of universities, public school projects, and academic utopia in post-independence Senegal and West Africa, The School of Mutants mobilizes spaces for the non-hierarchical production, transmission, and pluralization of knowledge. Through the production of video works, publications, exhibitions, assemblies, and training courses, The School of Mutants addresses the socio-cultural, ecological, and aesthetic mutations of reality. The project links the legacy of the short-lived Université des Mutants, founded in Senegal in 1977, to other utopias of the decade, as well as to literary and theoretical reflections on the epistemologies of mutation. The School of Mutants offers to collectively deconstruct and reconstruct the seminal ideologies of the teaching experiments that contributed to shifting paradigms and refocusing discourses on the African continent.
The film Mekas–Sembene: Dialogue from the Between World is commissioned and presented by National Kaunas Drama Theatre and Raw Material Company, as part of the creative European project Deconfining.
The School of Mutants, La Becque, 2024, photo Matthieu Croizier
‘Mekas-Sembene: Dialogue from the Between World’, stills
The School of Mutants, La Becque Open Studios, 2024, photo Aurélien Haslebacher