The School of Mutants was formed in 2018 by Stéphane V. Bottéro and Hamedine Kane as a collaborative platform for research, art and activism. With a home-base in Dakar, Senegal, The School is a nomadic collective, with a shifting number of participants from project to project, engaging internationally in cultural investigations, field work, participatory performances and conversations, archival research, writing, audio recording and sound art, film and video projects. Taking as a starting point the history of post-independence utopian approaches to education in Senegal, The School of Mutants applies its multidisciplinary approach to exploring the role of universities and educational infrastructures in the process of forming collective national identities in post-independence African countries, as well as to issues of land appropriation and urban development.
The School takes its name from an earlier educational project, The University of Mutants, founded on the Senegalese island of Gorée in 1978 with an emphasis on non-hierarchical teaching and decolonising academic structures and knowledge. Today, the colonial-era building that housed this short-lived pedagogic experiment is derelict. Meanwhile, the ghostly remnants of another utopian educational experiment also survive in the rural outskirts of Dakar: left unfinished in the middle of the Sébikotane Baobab forest is the futuristic concrete pyramid that would have housed the library of The University of the African Future, an ambitious project initiated in the 1990s by the president of Senegal and co-funded by many African states and the Republic of Taiwan but abandoned in 2005. Other pedagogic experiments such as the Mudra Dance School and the Forum Theatre movement are also revisited by The School of Mutants.
This exhibition is the second iteration of All Fragments of the Word Will Come Back Here to Mend Each Other, created by The School of Mutants members Lou Mo, Boris Raux, Valérie Osouf, Hamedine Kane and Stéphane V. Bottéro, and originally commissioned in 2022 for the 12th Berlin Biennale curated by Kader Attia. It is an important achievement for Leeds Arts University’s curator, Dr Marianna Tsionki, and one that says much for her international perspective and ambition, that she has collaborated with The School of Mutants to recreate the Berlin installation in Leeds, alongside a programme of related public events. Despite their central focus on pedagogy, a glance through the resumé of more than twenty exhibitions, residencies and public projects undertaken by The School of Mutants since its founding in 2018 will reveal that they have been centred on major art galleries and museums and the international biennales of the globalised contemporary art world. It is significant, and perhaps surprising, that this exhibition at Leeds Arts University is their first actually held in a university, or indeed in any primarily educational setting.

The installation is a sculptural re-creation of a central scene of the film Bamako (2006) by Abderrahmane Sissako. Set in the courtyard of Sissako’s childhood home in the capital city of Mali, the scene depicts a semi-fictional trial in which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are judged for the harsh consequences of their neo-colonial economic policies on the African continent and their continued assault against the sovereignty of African nations, giving voice to those at the sharp end of global capitalism in the South. Independence for African countries from the middle of the 20th century onwards ended direct geographic colonisation but replaced it with new, indirect forms of economic predation. The opportunities, and the optimism and hopes that independence brought, have too often been denied by the creation of new financial and political structures of dependence – the demands of the International Monetary Fund, for example, or the ‘debt-trap’ of massive foreign investment in large-scale infrastructure projects, loaning unmanageable sums to African countries in order to exploit their natural resources and exert undue influence on them as proxies in global superpower politics. An important aspect of the trial scene in Bamako is its intersection with the everyday lives and experiences of the people who live around the courtyard, so that the debates of the trial are confronted by other realities. Ordinary people are not simply observing powerful political and judicial institutions but also contributing to them, and this aspect of the film can be read as a metaphorical call for the kind of civic participation that recreates and prioritises social links in the micro-societies of neighbourhoods.
The undermining of the utopian optimism of the post-colonial liberation of the 1960s and 70s is central to The School of Mutants’ determination to transform flawed or failed education projects into a means to develop more dynamic models of education and reinvent the idea of the university for the future. As they put it in an article they wrote for e-flux Journal in 2020, ‘we are the ambassadors of the blurred mirages of lands that never fully materialised’. They invoke a way of looking that sees new possibilities to revive the missed opportunities of the past, locating hope for the future in past potentials that weren’t realised. Confronted by current geo-political, environmental and economic circumstances, this is the kind of optimism tempered with realism that not just Africa, but the whole world needs now.
Looking around the gallery, the central presence of a microphone stand and lectern, draped with a long paper scroll of typed script, announces this space as one of performance, action and declaration, rather than one focused solely on the contemplation of visual objects. The eye is immediately drawn to hanging textiles in the form of elaborate robes around the perimeter of the gallery, and a profusion of colourfully hand-painted school chairs. The robes and chairs imply human presence even in an empty gallery. There are ceramics and items of everyday furniture – tables, desks, a sideboard – and many books, letters and other textual material, conveying, even without scrutinising them, a sense that what is going on here is concerned with ideas, knowledge and study, as well as with visual experience.

The oversized robes have a powerful presence in the gallery, clearly referencing the ceremonial aspects of the trial in Bamako. In this context they invite a double reading, being reminiscent of the legal gowns of the colonialists’ courtrooms but also of traditional Senegalese garments such as the boubou, a flowing wide-sleeved robe worn across West Africa. As symbols of judicial authority and power, they are subverted by the colour, text and imagery appliquéd onto them. The austere blackness of the robes of colonial power is confronted by a colourful assertion of cultural Blackness, undoing the iconography of power and subverting the symbols of its oppression. The appliqué patches include fabrics digitally printed with black hands, book covers and pages from revolutionary literature, posters, and film stills from African liberation cinema, as well as the more recent fragmentary remnants of hi-vis life vests. These are a poignant reminder of the continued suffering of Black bodies, signifying the dangers and misery of migration alongside its hope.
The colours and the hand painted text on the many chairs around the gallery space perform a similar subversive role. Traditional European classroom chairs, of the kind ubiquitously found in the schoolrooms that colonisers introduced across the African continent, have been liberated from their function of ensuring that their occupiers sit passively to receive the knowledge being delivered to them, and instead become themselves the bearers of different forms of cultural knowledge – ‘disobedient knowledge’, as the message written on one of the chairs declares. This is further reinforced by their disruption of the uniformity of the classroom. Where once they would have been formally arranged in ranks to face the teacher’s voice of authority, now they are informally scattered, in circles and smaller groups facing each other, emphasising that this is a discursive, conversational space of dialogue, mutual respect and the exchange of ideas. In the context of the exhibition they also suggest the need to spend time, suggesting that the way this exhibition is to be best experienced and understood is durational rather than immediate. The presence of so many books and other writings in the form of archival material also emphasise this. Many of the books are iconic examples of anti-colonialism and African liberation politics, and of countercultural approaches to education in the 1960s and 70s. Some of these are a reminder of the parallels between Africa and the global North, and the sense that the counterculture involved a two-way exchange – for example, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) was as widely read and influential on activists for radical changes in education in Europe and the USA as it was in the colonially oppressed global South. It is interesting to see that the books included in the exhibition are not only from The School of Mutants’ own collection in the original installation of this work at the Berlin Biennale, but also selections from the library of Leeds Arts University, indicating the continuing and local relevance of these debates and ideas.

The kinds of practice and methodology adopted by The School of Mutants are often described as ‘relational’, a terminology used by Edouard Glissant and first applied to art practice by Nicolas Bourriaud to identify art that depends on human relations and their social contexts, rather than being the product of an individual maker. In this kind of practice, the artist is more a catalyst for action and social activity than the producer of an artefact intended to convey an idea. Once an action has been staged in a gallery, such relational practices necessarily present material objects and artefacts as a trace or index of the relational, or a stand-in for or symbol of social activity. In the context of this exhibition, the lectern and microphone stand would be an example of this, but it is important to recognise also that the exhibition is activated as soon as a viewer sits in one of the chairs, or picks up a book, or listens to the audio installations.
For audiences accustomed to more conventionally visual and object-based art, exhibitions where language, performance and social engagement are involved are sometimes seen as ‘difficult’ or inaccessible. Sometimes this leads to a tendency for curators to use lengthy labels and wall texts to interpret and explain the work, effectively telling viewers how and what to see. This exhibition, and indeed the entire rationale of The School of Mutants, proposes the opposite. Their approach to epistemic decolonisation – the refusal of the coloniser’s imposition of knowledge from ‘outside’, and advocacy for generating mutant forms of knowledge through interaction and freedom of thought – is equally applicable to the epistemes of the art world and art education. This work need not be ‘difficult’ for anyone open to looking, experiencing and feeling for themselves. The intuitive and the poetic in art are a surer means of access to understanding than a reliance on the didactic and over-interpreted. Both universities and art galleries can (and arguably should) be micro-communities of and spaces for unlearning and relearning, where knowledge is created, recreated and shared. The most powerful art defies what we already think we know.
The School of Mutants: All Fragments of the Word Will Come Back Here to Mend Each Other is on at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University, 1 February – 28 March 2024.
Derek Horton is an artist-curator, writer and educator, from Birmingham and based in Leeds.
This review is supported by Leeds Arts University.
Published 05.03.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,965 words