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 the 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. Their inquiry into educational infrastructures that emerged in relation to independence in West Africa continues through this collaboration with a research residency, an exhibition, an assembly and this publication. 

The texts gathered here respond, from different perspectives, to the urgent question of how we might develop a new relationship to the dreams of the past, in relation to the needs of the present. The publication opens with the Mutants’ Charter, a shifting and self-aware reference to the manifesto format that has given order to the hopes of innumerable political and artistic movements. A correspondence between the School of Mutants and RAW Material Company delves into the generative space of their coming together at this particular moment. Following this, writer Mamadou Diallo traces the deficits inherent to the mainstream school systems in French West Africa, but also identifies opportunities and spaces for intervention. Taking Dakar’s University Cheikh Anta Diop as her starting point, in a text that poignantly situates itself in Dakar but moves across geographies and spectral realms, artist Frida Robles Ponce shares her thoughts on the roles that ghosts play in knowledge transmission. Finally - for now - in an interview between the School of Mutants and sociologist and anthropologist Joseph Tonda, the fantasy of the university comes face to face with the realities of so-called “higher” education on the African continent.