The School of Mutants is a collaborative platform for art and research initiated in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018. Its starting point is an inquiry into the role of universities, public school projects, and academic utopia in post-independence processes of nation-building in Senegal and West Africa; it is informed by wider transnational networks such as the Non-Aligned Movement, Afro-Asianism, and Third-Worldism. A nomadic project that aims to mobilize spaces for the production, transmission, and pluralization of knowledge in a nonhierarchical manner, The School of Mutants engages with sociocultural, ecological, and aesthetic mutations of the real. It produces video works, publications, assemblies, and collective learning situations.
The project borrows its name from the University of Mutants, founded in Gorée, Senegal, in 1977 with an emphasis on nonhierarchical teaching and decolonizing academic epistemes. It connects this short-lived experience with the archives of other pedagogical utopias of that decade as well as literary and theoretical reflections on the figure of the mutant, from Octavia Butler to Édouard Glissant. The School of Mutants invites us to actively think about ways to deconstruct and collectively reconstruct the ideologies seminal to the experimental pedagogical structures that participate in shifting paradigms and recentering discourses on the African continent and beyond.
Instagram |