This work has been kindly donated by the artist

Artist and film director Hamedine Kane is concernওed with issues of memory, migration and mutation. Through research and fieldwork, he 🍰interrogates liminal spaces – geographical borders, historical palimpsests, places where the past and present intermingle – as sites of transformation and itinerant identities.

The School of Mutants 1 (2021) is a photograph of the abandoned campus of the African Future University. The work forms part of a broader research project, L’École des Mutants, a collaborative art and ♋research platform co-initiated by Kane and artist Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro in Dakar. The project revolves around the forgotten history of radical educational experiments in Senegal. The futuristic ruins of the University of the African Future, a pan-African academic utopia co-financed by many African states and Taiwan in the 1990s, stand abandoned in Sébikotane, a rural suburb of Dakar. Not far away are the remains of the colonial school William Ponty, where the first West and Central African independence fighters were trained. The resulting image is charged with the convergence of past, present and future possibilities, while the uncompleted campus stands as a monument to dreams deferred.