HAMEDINE KANE, STÉPHANE VERLET-BOTTÉRO, AND NATHALIE MUCHAMAD WITH OLIVIA ANANI AND LOU MO

For Taipei Biennial 2020, Kane, Verlet-Bottéro and Nathalie Muchamad worked with artists Olivia Anani and Lou Mo to create The School of Mutants (2020), an installation that engages with an ongoing investigation into representations of futurity on the African continent. The work focuses on post-independence architecture in Africa and political utopias in Senegal. The construction of the University of African Future, a 1990s transnational cooperation project funded in part by Taiwan in the framework of its diplomatic efforts in West Africa, was never completed.

The installation created for the Taipei Biennial includes archive materials and a sound piece composed of found media and fragments of political discourse in different Taiwanese and Senegalese dialects.

The batik fabric pieces featuring visual patterns produced in collaboration with Indonesian-New Caledonian artist Nathalie Muchamad are related to Pan-Africanism and the Non-Aligned Movement (a forum of 120 countries which, in the context of the Cold War, refused to rally to either the US or the USSR). The video work was made during the lockdown period in Dakar. The artists are seen building a DIY radio station that picks up a fictional interview between two protagonists about a speculative future where the ruins of the quarantined city have become the stage of a revolutionary becoming. Abandoned public university projects in Taiwan have also been filmed and added to this scenery, evoking the decaying legacy of Afro-Asianism.

Ocula 2020