THE SCHOOL OF MUTANTS

The School of Mutants is as a Dakar-based collaborative platform for research, art and activism initiated in 2018 by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro and Hamedine Kane. Their approach involves collective investigations, field work, public assemblies, archive research, writing, and film productions, taking as a starting point the history of post-independence utopia in education in Senegal. Partially supported by the Republic of China (Taiwan), several of these radical, pan-Africanist university projects, abandoned or never-completed, are located in a rural suburb home to ongoing land struggle and environmental resistance against neoliberal urbanization plans.

The artistic process reflects on African futurism, anti-imperialist ecologies, and the legacy of Afro-Asianism, non-alignment and Southern solidarities. It has been exhibited internationally and has resulted in a three-channel video installation, a collective manifesto, an archive, and other mixed-media materials. It has also engaged a series of conversations in various contexts – workshops, discussions, assemblies, and an upcoming book.

Image credit: The uncompleted campus library of the University of African Future. Copyright: Hamedine Kane & Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro.

Featured image credit: Textile mapping the circulation of ideas, initiatives and political alliances linked to the history of the utopias explored by the School of Mutants, on the African continent, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia.

http://www.stephaneverletbottero.info/the-school-of-mutants