Playtime is a site for nonconventional learning—a playful installation welcoming both children and adults, encouraging curiosity, imagination, and collective knowledge building. The installation moves against formal architectures of learning, allowing freedom of movement and engagement with its surroundings and other visitors. Part of the installation is nomadic—moving into the neighborhoods, parks, and public squares of Prizren—to engage with diverse communities and activate neglected urban spaces through storytelling, educational activities, and a new kind of sociability. School of Mutants is a collaborative platform for art and research initiated in 2018, in Dakar, Senegal. Working across geographies through engagement with sociocultural, ecological, and aesthetic mutations of the real, the collective aims to mobilize spaces for the production, transmission, decentral-ization, and pluralization of knowledge in nonhierarchical ways. Departing from research into the educational infrastructures and pedagogical utopias that emerged in post-independence Senegal and West Africa, the collective reflects on the legacies of African futurism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and Southern solidarities, and imagines new practices of mutual, decolonized learning. The collective borrows its name from the University of Mutants, established in 1978 on the island of Gorée, Senegal, known for experimental knowledge sharing and challenging the Western epistemological authority.

The locations and activities of the nomadic installation will be announced on the Autostrada Biennale website and elsewhere.

School of Mutants is based between Dakar, Brussels, Paris, Taipei, London, and Saint-Étienne. Participating members in Autostrada Biennale are Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Hamedine Kane, Boris Raux, Diane Cescutti, Lou Mo, and Fabrice Pichat.

Text by Ieva Laube