The School of Mutants

The School of Mutants is a collaborative art and research platform, initiated in 2018 by Hamedine Kane & Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro. The project aims to mobilize spaces for the production, transmission and pluralization of knowledge in a non-hierarchical way, in connection with socio-cultural, ecological and aesthetic mutations of the real. After journeying through Dakar with Kër Thiossane to focus on the Ponty School, to Taipei to explore the University of African Future (UFA) and to Nantes with an exhibition on the UFA, as of October 2021 the two artistes have begun a new chapter with RAW Material Company. Here, they continue their inquiry into educational infrastructures that emerged in relation to independence in West Africa.

The project borrows its name from the University of the Mutants, which was founded in Gorée in 1977. The works presented in this exhibition reactivate this horizontal, non-academic and non-aligned experience by entering into dialogue with the archives of other pedagogical utopias of the decade between 1970 and 1980: the Mudra school developed by choreographer Germaine Acogny at Dakar’s Musée Dynamique, the Afrihili linguistics center created in Ghana by engineer Kumi Attobrah for the invention of a pan-African lingua franca, and Octavia Butler’s writings where characters, mutants and cyborgs hybridize multiple forms of knowledge.

In the form of an archive, sculptures, textile and sound pieces, and a three-channel video which, between a cinema of the real and futuristic speculation, the installation articulates the bright “spectacle” of these ephemeral experiences, and their potential contribution to contemporary reflections on learning.  

With the participation of Bass Design, Baudoin Diompy, Nunu Design, Valérie Osouf and Patrick Chamoiseau.