Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art
A room with white walls, the walls are covered with hanging artwork and coats, and in the centre are a selection of brightly coloured chairs with a lectern and microphone in front.
The School of Mutants, All Fragments of the Word Will Come Back Here to Mend Each Other, 2022
installation view at 12th Berlin Biennale
Courtesy of the artists. Photograph by dotgain.info
Participants
Thomas Abercromby & The School of Mutants
Presented by

This project takes the form of ongoing collective research by a group of artists and has been supported by Glasgow International.

For more information on future public aspects of the project, check back soon. 

Supported by

Supported by Glasgow International with Funds from the Scottish Government's Festivals EXPO Fund 

The School of Mutants and artist-curator Thomas Abercromby, are undertaking a research project between Glasgow and Dakar which aims to explore the creating, dissemination and diversification of knowledge. The project draws inspiration from Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène's novel God's Bits of Wood, 1960, and seeks to delve into the intertwined narratives of colonialism, extraction, labour, class struggle and freedom.

The School of Mutants (Boris Raux, Hamedine Kane, Lou Mo, Stéphane Verlet Bottéro, Valérie Osouf and Diane Cescutti) is a nomadic collaborative platform for art and research, initiated in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018. It develops multidisciplinary inquiries on the role of universities and educational infrastructures in the process of forming collective national identities in post-independent Senegal and West Africa. Taking the form of installations, fieldwork, films, archive research, publications, public assemblies and collaborative learning, the project aspires to mobilise spaces for the production, transmission and pluralisation of knowledge in a non-hierarchical way. 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.

Thomas Abercromby is an artist and curator exploring micro-utopias and underrepresented narratives through various mediums, including film, installations, and pedagogical programming.