The School of Mutants

The School of Mutants

The School of Mutants is a nomadic collaborative platform for art and research. It was initiated in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018, as a multidisciplinary inquiry on the role of universities and educational infrastructures in the process of forming collective national identities in post-independent Senegal and West Africa. Since then, taking the form of installations, fieldwork, films, archive research, publications and public assemblies, the project aspires to mobilise spaces for the production, transmission and pluralisation of knowledge in non-hierarchical ways. Engaging with sociocultural, ecological and aesthetic mutations of the real, the artistic process reflects on African futurism, anti-imperialist ecologies, and the legacy of Afro-Asianism, Non-Alignment and southern solidarities.

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What if Jonas Mekas and Ousmane Sembene met today?

The School of Mutants is currently developing a film and multimedia installation around a fictional encounter between legendary filmmakers Ousmane Sembene and Jonas Mekas. Both were born in the same week, at the end of 1922. Both have lived through the political turmoil of the twentieth century and the adversity of the film industry.

A pioneer of African cinema with the first film from the continent, Borom Sarret, Ousmane Sembène worked as a dockworker in Marseille, writing, campaigning and building his political ethos before being conscripted into the colonial army on the Algerian front. He trained in cinema at the VGIK school in Moscow and viewed filmmaking as a tool of liberation from coloniality, the State and patriarchy. A member of a resistance network during the Lithuanian war, Jonas Mekas fled his country and spent time in refugee camps in Germany before moving to New York, where he founded the Anthology Film Archives, an experimental film archive in Brooklyn. His many films celebrate friendship and capture the fragility of the present moment.

Each of them invented a cinematic language, driven by a relentless ideal of autonomy. Our work in progress is a search for witnesses and legacies of both artists. Through interviews and encounters, we explore the resonance of their work with crises of the contemporary world. Does moving image still have political power? How can poetry and politics be articulated? How do artists define the means of their vision?

Masterclass concept

For this masterclass, Hamedine Kane and Stéphane V. Bottéro from The School of Mutants propose to create a temporary collaborative research platform to collectively investigate the lives of these two very different artists who never met. Through activities that navigate between theoretical considerations and practical creative processes, such as screenings, readings, discussions, walks, filmmaking and mapping workshops, we’d like to explore how various creative acts and practices of relation can provoke unexpected frictions and overlaps across what Edward Said named the “between-worlds”.