The School of Mutants (SN/MR/FR)

Residency period: September-November 2024

instagram.com/theschoolofmutants

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.

In addition to numerous presentations in Dakar, recent works by The School of Mutants have been shown at the Berlin Biennale (2022), the Centre Pompidou in Metz (2021), Sheffield DocFest (2021), the Taipei Biennale (2020), and the Oslo Architecture Triennial (2019).

The School of Mutants is currently developing a film and multimedia installation around a fictional encounter between legendary filmmakers Ousmane Sembene and Jonas Mekas. A search for witnesses and legacies of both artists, who were born in the same week at the end of 1922, and have lived through the political turmoil of the twentieth century and the adversity of the film industry, this work in progress explore the resonance of their work with crises of the contemporary world through fictional and documented encounters. Do moving images still have political power? How can poetry and politics be articulated? How do artists define the means of their vision?

The School of Mutants, La Becque, 2024, photo Matthieu Croizier