The afterlives of Bandung tell us more about political imagination and transnational identification than about attendance.
Lee (2010)
Bandung After Bandung: Archives, Memories, and Reactivations
This research takes the Bandung Conference as its starting point, not as a historical rupture or a turning point between two worlds, but as a vivid trace whose resonances deserve careful examination. Our interest lies less in the event itself than in the ways it persists, shifts, and reinvents itself through the gestures and imaginaries of contemporary artists. Bandung thus appears less as a fixed past than as an archive in motion, a living memory continually reworked by the present. This study nonetheless distinguishes three levels that should not be mixed: Bandung as a historical event; Bandung as a political memory retrospectively reconstructed; and Bandung as a symbolic, critical, and aesthetic resource reactivated in contemporary practices. The objective is therefore not to establish a chronological continuity between 1955 and the present, but rather to analyze the uses, displacements, and reconfigurations of this reference.
Within the tense post-war context, marked by the hegemony of a small number of major powers (five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council) which scarcely concealed the bipolar division of the world under the leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union, the most significant and arguably most poorly taught process of the twentieth century was unfolding: decolonization. The Bandung Conference emerged as an attempt to redraw the map of the world beyond the territories circumscribed and monitored by the two superpowers. It embodied a break with the binary logic of the Cold War and a challenge to white racial supremacy through the affirmation of the political, cultural, and epistemic sovereignty of countries of the Global South. The anti-imperialism expressed therein is intended to be cross-cutting and open to different ideological orientations, with the aim of building a multilateralism grounded in the equality of nations, which clearly challenges the international order inherited from Yalta and the perpetuation of the colonial order. It offers an alternative vision of modernity based on respect for cultures, sovereignty, development, and non-alignment, highlighting alternative models inspired by socialism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Asianism, and Pan-Africanism. Recent reinterpretations of Bandung, however, invite us not to reduce this moment to a mere diplomatic step in the process of decolonization: they also view it as a normative, emotional, and political laboratory from which formerly colonized peoples imagined alternative forms of international order, solidarity, and world-building (Getachew, 2019; Phạm & Shilliam, 2016; Tan & Acharya, 2008).
The origins of the meeting can be traced back to the Colombo Conference of 1954[1], which brought together India, Ceylon[2], Indonesia, Burma, and Pakistan. The group formed at that meeting foreshadowed, in a way, the conference held the following year on the island of Java under the leadership of Sukarno, President and founding father of modern Indonesia. Leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Zhou Enlai, and Sukarno himself viewed the gathering as an opportunity to articulate an alternative stance in response to the dual threat of Western neocolonialism and the competing interventions of the two superpowers (Lee, 2010). This historical reminder helps situate the Bandung moment as a point of historical condensation from which a range of narratives, affiliations, and political, intellectual, and artistic appropriations subsequently emerged. The Bandung Conference thus marked the emergence of a political Third World, that gave rise to what became known as the Non-Aligned Movement, first announced through the Brioni Declaration in 1956 and formalized in Belgrade in 1961.
The Bandung Conference fostered solidarity among the countries of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, united by their shared experience of colonialism. These nations still bore the memory of the World War, during which the peoples of the Global South were exploited by powers that plundered their resources and subjected their populations to various forms of domination. By supporting ongoing anti-colonial struggles (particularly in Algeria and Southern Africa), the conference helped forge a form of political solidarity among Southern[3] states that prefigured new models of South—South cooperation in the cultural, educational, and economic spheres. It redefined international relations and, in this sense, inaugurated a new paradigm that would profoundly influence postcolonial thought and theory, as well as artistic and literary practices (Négritude, African socialist realism, and militant cinema etc.).
It is within this broader framework, at the intersection of global history, aesthetic resonances, and political struggles, that this article situates its inquiry. The analysis adopts a qualitative approach that brings together cultural history, postcolonial studies, the examination of artistic and curatorial practices, and attention to contemporary uses of the archive. It draws on historical and critical texts devoted to Bandung, exhibition documents, project narratives, artworks, curatorial dispositive, as well as archives and material traces linked to sites or institutions whose histories continue to be shaped by the unfulfilled promises of independence. Without claiming to provide an exhaustive overview of contemporary Senegalese art, the practices examined form a contextual body of work, selected for its capacity to bring back into view, through contemporary artistic and curatorial forms, a number of issues inherited from Bandung. The collective “École des Mutants” adeptly articulates grounded research, archives, assembly mechanism, a critical reading of ruins, and the reactivation of political imaginaries emerging from the Global South. The aim is therefore not to interpret these traces solely through the lens of postcolonial nostalgia or unfulfilled promises. Rather, what interests us is the way in which these vestiges become, in certain contemporary artistic practices, surfaces of activation, sites of inquiry, critical operators, and matrices for the critical reinterpretation of the present.
A Whirlwind of Ideas
The spirit of Bandung is undoubtedly shaped by divergent interests within a deeply divided world. Leaders did not share the same views on international politics, nor did they hold a common understanding of imperialism. Moreover, tensions and competing currents emerged in the interactions between Indian and Indonesian leaders and officials.
Nevertheless, they converged around a shared egalitarian and universalist vision: the denunciation of colonialism, the fight against racism (particularly apartheid) and the defense of universal rights. The final declaration, based on the ten principles adopted at the close of the conference, bears witness to this commitment: It sought to promote human rights and the Charter of the United Nations while reinterpreting them through the experiences, needs, and political realities of the countries of the Global South.
The Bandung Conference inspired a non-aligned vision of culture and political thought, conceived as the affirmation of an autonomous path for the peoples of the Global South. This is also embodied in Sukarno’s opening speech (1955): “live and let live”. In terms of principles, there is, of course, that of peaceful coexistence (emphasizing peaceful relations between the two blocs): economic and political systems should not hinder cooperation among developing or newly independent countries, which must break free from the logic of aligning with one superpower or the other. This new principle has endured on the international stage beyond the conference; it can still be found in many South-South cooperation initiatives to this day.
The Bandung Conference was also a highly publicized event, bringing together some four hundred journalists as well as envoys sent by various powers to observe the peoples’ aspiration to defend their self-determination. The symbolic significance of the gathering was quickly highlighted by several observers. Léopold Sédar Senghor, who attended as a representative of the French government of which he was then a member, would later describe it as the “thunderclap of Bandung[4],” a phrase reported by Odette Guitard and subsequently cited in several studies on African reactions of Bandung. The African American journalist and renowned writer Richard Wright, for his part, made it the title and subject of his book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference.
In a contribution delivered at a conference in Beijing, Mamadou Diouf invites us to reconsider the Bandung moment through the lens of Anglophone literature. He characterizes the “spirit of Bandung” as follow: “it is about the meeting of the human race that constitutes the forces of world history in the making”, “the emergence of new nations that embodied racial, religious, and class consciousness”. It was, in his words, “the first international conference of peoples of color in the history of humankind[5]”. Diouf also highlights attempts to reconcile the cultural legacies and values of newly independent nations with the instruments of modernity (all while simultaneously freeing themselves from the anxieties fueled by East-West rivalry). Finally, the spirit of Bandung lies in the conviction that rapid development is possible through the application of modern science and industrialization (see Wright, 1956).
From the Color Curtain to the Afterlives of Bandung
In The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), the writer Richard Wright draws connections between the Bandung Conference and the emerging Civil Rights Movement in the United States (Wright, 2021). He explores the idea that racism, colonialism, and imperialism together constitute a “color curtain” separating the white world from non-white peoples. Convinced of the historical significance of the moment, Wright attended the conference as an observer, unlike other African American authors such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. His presence resulted from a personal initiative driven by political and intellectual commitment, a commitment that would later lead him to Nkrumah’s Ghana as well (Vitalis, 2013). His account provides a framework for examining this period, which he interprets as a symbolic turning point: the moment when peoples of color asserted their capacity to take control of their own destinies. While he does not ignore the internal contradictions of the Non-Aligned Movement, his remarks primarily championed the African American cause through a call for solidarity among people of color engaged in a common fight against imperialist, capitalist, Western, and white forms of exploitation. It is worth noting that the Afro-Asian Conference established a cultural committee alongside its political and economic committees. Adam Clayton Powell, the Democratic representative from Harlem in the House of the Representatives and an African American civil rights leader sent by the United States to Bandung (U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives, n.d.). His presence enabled the United States to project the image of a Black elected official serving in Congress, even as segregation and racial discrimination remained central to international criticism directed at the country. Powell asserts that his presence at the conference constituted “living proof that there is no truth in the Communist accusation that Black people are oppressed in America” (Bostermann, 2001, p. 96, cited in Perucci, 2009, p. 40). Yet, according to Mamadou Diouf, the opposite occurred. By sending Powell as a representative of the Eisenhower administration while simultaneously preventing the travel of Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as many other African Americans whose passport applications had allegedly been “misplaced”, the United States effectively undermined Powell’s claim.
Between the Western and Eastern blocs, a movement emerged in search of a third path to development. Christopher J. Lee’s approach in his book Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Lee, 2010), analyzes Bandung as a founding moment in the political imagination of the Third World and emphasizes the forward-looking dimension and mythical potential of this event. According to him, the 1955 conference marked the starting point of a political proposal that envisioned an alternative future. In other words, the significance of the Afro-Asian Conference of Bandung lies not so much in its immediate diplomatic outcomes as in the symbolic and epistemological momentum it instilled in formerly colonized peoples.
Indeed, its significance goes far beyond the signing of agreements or the creation of short-term institutions. It inaugurates a new global stage on which nations long excluded from major international decision-making processes are speaking out for the first time as sovereign actors, proclaiming that “a new Asia and a new Africa have been born” (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2025). Its significance therefore lies in the symbolic weight that the event has gradually acquired: that of a moment of liberation, solidarity, and openness, which galvanizes hope for an alternative to the binary paradigm of the Cold War. From this perspective, Bandung may be understood as a mobile archive[6], endowed with considerable narrative, political, and aesthetic[7] power. The event of 1955 is not a diplomatic episode frozen in the past; rather, it remains an active reference point in memories, imaginations, and activist, intellectual, artistic, and cultural practices. Over the decades, artists, intellectuals, and thinkers (particularly within Afro-Asian and Pan-African movements) have invoked the “spirit of Bandung” to fuel projects of collective liberation or the reconfiguration of political alliances. It is evident, for example, in Afro-Asian cultural networks organized around the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings; in the tricontinental expansion of anti-imperialist solidarities in Havana in 1966; or in contemporary artistic and curatorial projects that revisit the images, specters, and unfulfilled promises of Bandung. These successive appropriations (repetition, displacement, reinterpretation) confer upon the event a performative dimension that continues to generate meaning, shape political imaginaries, and serve as a point of reference for the formulation of collective identities in the Global South.
By adopting this perspective, one moves away from a teleological interpretation of history that would treat Bandung as the direct cause of subsequent political alignments. For Christopher Lee, the conference does not appear as a closed or self-contained founding moment, but rather as a condition of possibility: it renders new forms of international relations thinkable. Far from being the immediate cause of alliances among newly decolonized states, the conference opened a space for symbolic and political experimentation, a laboratory for South-South solidarity, for novel modes of postcolonial subject formation, and for an alternative diplomacy grounded in civil society.
The event thus functioned as a catalyst for political imaginaries: it made conceivable forms of collective organization and political identification that would sometimes materialize only much later and in very different contexts. Following Christopher Lee, the legacy of Bandung (what he calls its afterlives) ultimately tells us far more about forms of political imagination and processes of transnational identification than it does about the conference itself (Lee, 2010). Felwine Sarr’s reflections in Afrotopia, which call for thinking Africa through its capacity to generate its own horizons of meaning, its own forms of projection, and its own desirable futures (Sarr, 2016), move in a similar direction. Similarly, Adom Getachew reminds us that anticolonial projects were not aimed solely at national independence, but at a genuine reconfiguration of the world order (Getachew, 2019). These approaches help us understand how certain aspirations toward solidarity, emancipation, and transnational identity were able to circulate, be reshaped, and be revitalized beyond the historical moment of 1955.
However, the historiographical debate over whether certain iconic figures were present or not will show[8] us, later, just how much the event itself, the official speeches or the list of participants were far from secondary matters, since they were at the center of conflicting issues of memory and representation. Such debates and appropriations form part of a broader process of constructing a mobilized past, a usable past[9], driven by Afro-Asian and Pan-African artists, intellectuals, and activists who, over the decades, have revived the legacy of Bandung, deploying its narrative, symbolic, affective, and aesthetic power within contemporary struggles. The persistence of these images, narratives, and the emotional memory of transnational solidarity attests to Bandung’s enduring influence. It can be observed in artistic and curatorial practices such as Ruins and Futures and A Tale of Asparagus by the École des Mutants; in the monetary and administrative fictions of Mansour Ciss Kanakassy; and in Jihan El Tahri’s archival assemblages on Afro-Asian solidarities. The event functions as a floating signifier of world history, whose meaning and scope are never fully fixed but continually transformed through political, memorial, and aesthetic reframings that vary by contexts and the struggles that appropriate it or claim it as their own. (Hall, 1997; Laclau, 2005). Far from diluting its memory, these successive shifts, on the contrary, reveal its power to mobilize: Bandung becomes an accessible, shareable, and reclaimable past, a usable past serving presents in search of recognition, connection, and collective reconstruction. What emerges is a non-linear conception of history, in which the anticolonial past does not remain behind us but continues to inform, haunt, and at times orient contemporary political imaginaries.
It is precisely in the gap between historical fact, political memory, and contemporary appropriation that an important dimension of Bandung’s legacy unfolds. It is therefore important to distinguish the documentable event (see speeches, delegations, and archives) from the memorial and ideological uses subsequently made of it, and from the artistic reinterpretations that are shifting its meaning today. This distinction helps avoid confusing the historical reality of the conference with the narratives that have gradually transformed it into a symbolic, political, and aesthetic resource.
The example of Kwame Nkrumah’s alleged presence at Bandung serves precisely to shed light on this tension between documentary evidence and commemorative affiliation, and to examine the mechanisms through which certain historical events are, in hindsight, invested with a symbolic significance that sometimes exceeds their factual reality, and what these constructions reveal. This association does not originate from the conference archives themselves but from later narratives (historiographical, Pan-Africanist, and activist) that gradually incorporated Nkrumah into the “Bandung moment” due to the alignment of his ideas with anticolonial, Pan-Africanism, and non-alignment. In The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History (Shanguhyia & Falola, 2018), this symbolic appropriation is discussed in relation to African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré, who have come to be associated with the Bandung legacy despite not having physically attended the conference. This illustrates the manner in which Bandung was progressively reinscribed into a broader Pan-African genealogy. It is precisely this tension between actual participation and historical affiliation that Robert Vitalis sets out to clarify in his historiographical reinterpretation of the conference. By comparing later accounts with the conference proceedings, official participant lists, and diplomatic archives, he argues that Nkrumah was not among the delegates present in 1955. For Vitalis (2013), this recurring error, found both in academic literature and in certain activist discourses, reflects a later and largely uncritical construction of Bandung, reinforced by the desire to create a “unified Pan-African narrative” that tends to homogenize the African presence and to mythologize the conference as the inaugural stage of an already established Pan-Africanism. His analysis therefore distinguishes the historical event, in its documentary reality, from the mobilizing political myth that gradually emerged around it.
This distinction both aligns with and diverges from Christopher Lee’s analyses of the afterlives of Bandung and the African uses of post-Bandung memory, in which Nkrumah becomes an emblematic figure through ideological association rather than direct participation. Vitalis interprets the conference as a “global ideological moment”, taken up by figures who were physically absent but who extend or reorient its meaning. Whereas Vitalis emphasizes the need to correct factual inaccuracies and dismantle misleading reconstructions, Lee invites us to understand what these appropriations produce within African political imaginaries. He thus refuses to reduce Bandung to a mere list of attendees and instead encourages an understanding of the event’s performative dimension: how the event was received, displaced, mythologized, and rendered available for other narratives of liberation. It is within this gap between historical fact and the power of memory that an essential dimension of Bandung’s enduring legacy is forged.
Ruined Utopias: From the Pan-African Past to Contemporary Extractivism
In the practices analyzed below, the legacy of Bandung is explored through places marked by abandonment, incompletion, or disuse (William Ponty, the African Future University, and the University of Mutants) which give tangible form to unfulfilled postcolonial promises. These ruins are therefore not considered mere remnants of the past but rather sites of activation, from which conflicts of memory, contemporary uses of the archive, and situated forms of political speculation about unfinished futures are continually reenacted (De Boeck, 2011; Sarr, 2016; Stoler, 2013). To conceive of Bandung as a living archive thus requires shifting the analysis from a purely symbolic register toward a more material, political, and spatial understanding of traces. For Mbembe (2002), the archive is not simply a repository of memory; it is also a sedimentation of power relations, a deposit of violence, and an organization of the visible and the invisible. Such a perspective makes it possible to read the ruins discussed here not as simple metaphors of the past but as concrete forms of historical survival. Extending this approach, the work of Hal Foster[10] helps us understand how certain contemporary artistic practices engage with the archive not through a logic of melancholic preservation, but through processes of assemblage, rearrangement, and critical experimentation (Foster, 2004). The significance of these ruins therefore lies less in what they preserve intact from the past than in what they enable to be recomposed in the present: the archive becomes less a relic than an ongoing process of work and inquiry.
The project Ruins and Futures, developed by the collective École des Mutants and presented at Ker Thiossane in 2019, juxtaposes Senegalese initiatives (dating from before independence) that have been left to fall into disrepair with the ambitious projects of the post-independence Senegal, most of which remained unfinished: the radical educational experiments of the University of Mutants (1978–2005), Mudra (1977–1982), the African Future University (1992–2005). This perspective revisits the promises and the unfulfilled forms of dreams of the future (De Boeck, 2011).
The École des Mutants collective, originally composed of Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro and Hamedine Kane, is a collaborative and transdisciplinary artistic and research platform that evolves, grows, and mutates through encounters. Its practice is based on fieldwork, archival research, public assemblies, and multimedia exhibitions (including films, audio, etc.) to explore forms of radical transformation and aesthetic disobedience. It takes its name from the eponymous institution founded in Gorée Island in 1977 as a horizontal, non-academic, and non-aligned pedagogical experiment. The second phase of their research, presented at Ker Thiossane during Partcours 8[11], was also a way to examine the role citizens play in shaping the territory. The presentation of their residency, in the form of multidisciplinary installation, was also preceded by an Assembly of African Futures held “in front of the ruins of William Ponty[12] School” in Sébikotane. The selection of this collective does not claim to exhaust all contemporary resonances of Bandung in Senegal. It constitutes a particularly valuable observatory insofar as it articulates, in an especially explicit manner, archival work, the critical reading of ruins, political speculation, and the reactivation of imaginaries of South—South solidarity.
Embodied in the highly symbolic image that constitutes the attempt to repurpose the ruins of the unfinished African Future University (AFU) into a petroleum and gas institute by the Senegalese[13] government, the project above all portrays the abrupt transition from a dream of Pan-African education to an extractivist reality and thus becomes an illustration of the transformation of political ideals into neoliberal interests. It undermines the spirit of Bandung, which, after all, championed sovereignty and independence of the nations of the Global South and for South—South cooperation, through the shift toward a “predatory petrocracy” (Kane et al., 2020), a partial failure of Bandung’s promises, which were diverted by postcolonial realpolitik.
Plural Spaces and Temporalities
These sites are not examined as mere architectural remnants, but as spaces in which certain promises associated with the Bandung imaginary: cultural sovereignty, the training of African elites, the circulation of knowledge, and the projection of a Pan-African future, are materialized, displaced, or exhausted. Reading them in this way makes it possible to move beyond a diplomatic history of Bandung and toward an examination of its material, institutional, and artistic afterlives in Senegal.
On the one hand, there are the ruins of the William Ponty Teacher Training College, a place where an emerging African elite were educated within the French empire, including numerous future ministers, heads of state, and government leaders such as Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Modibo Keïta, Hubert Maga, Mathias Sorgho, Hamani Diori, Mamadou Dia, and Abdoulaye Wade. Originally established in Saint-Louis in 1903 under the initiative of General Louis Faidherbe, the William Ponty School was transferred to Gorée Island in 1913 and later to Sébikotane in 1937 (Wade, 2008). The institution continued after independence but gradually lost its distinctiveness following educational reforms and the proliferation of Teacher Training Institutes (Écoles de Formation d’Instituteurs, [EFI]). Regarded by some as a “prestigious” institution and a “breeding ground” for future leaders, it has been criticized by others as an ideological instrument that “played the same role as the colonial army”, “the school of submission, compromise, and balance at any cost”, or even “the graveyard of African intelligence” (Sow, 2017). Beyond the divergent assessments, the William Ponty Teacher Training school undoubtedly occupied a significant place in the cultural and political life of the twentieth century in West Africa.
On the other hand, one can find the remains of the African Future University, located not far from the former site, within the smart city of Diamniadio, where urbanization has proceeded at breakneck speed under the banner of “emergence”. It forms part of the many ambitious construction projects launched and subsequently abandoned during the presidency of Abdoulaye Wade. Launched in 2005, the project was abandoned before completion and will never welcome students. It remains both a silent witness to the unfulfilled ambitions of a generation. Today, the AFU buildings stand abandoned, overtaken by vegetation that has reclaimed the site, forming ghostly ruins visible in Sébi Ponty on the outskirts of Dakar. The expansion of this new urban hub came at a considerable cost to both local populations and the environment. Some of Senegal’s most fertile agricultural lands were rendered unusable; homes were demolished and residents forcibly displaced to free land for the project; and a large portion of a centuries-old baobab forest was cleared to make way for the infrastructure of the Diamniadio development zone.
The choice of Sébi Ponty as the location for the African Future University (AFU), echoes the decision made earlier when the renowned Ponty School was relocated (at that time, it was moved from Gorée Island to Sébikotane to accommodate a larger campus). It shows the ambition of Wade, himself a former Ponty student, to symbolically situate his university of the future within the continuity of “the original vision of a governing regional elite” (de Jong & Quinn, 2014) and to revive the aspiration for a prosperous and self-sufficient African future (de Jong & Quinn, 2014). In other words, it represented his attempt to cultivate his own Pan-African dream, that of a vast continental network of centres of excellence in higher education (de Jong & Quinn, 2014), designed to prepare a new generation of administrators and leaders capable of driving Africa’s economic development and fostering growth[14]. Inspired by his own educational trajectory and experience as a Ponty alumnus, Wade regarded the AFU as a model to be replicated. Yet, these ruins testify not only to the failure of a grand modernizing project, they also bear the material traces of a political order that produced abandonment, displacement, and vulnerability. From a perspective close to that developed by Achille Mbembe, they may be read as sedimentations of power, where the promise of the future becomes inseparable from the unequal distribution of lives, land, and possibilities for inhabiting space. The ruin thus appears as the spatial inscription of enduring political and social violence.
Inaugurated in Gorée Island, at the initiative of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Roger Garaudy, the University of Mutants constitutes, in the background of this discussion, a third significant site. Established in 1977, this experimental institution represents one of the spaces through which, after Bandung, the imagination of a non-academic, non-aligned, and intercontinental pedagogy was extended. It operated as a public administrative institution under the supervision of the Senegalese Ministry of Culture (Riffard, 2024). The university officially opened its doors on 6 January 1979 and offered two three-month training cycles each year. The term “Mutants” was used metaphorically to designate “an individual or a group of individuals carrying within themselves the project of a new economic, social and cultural order” (Riffard, 2024), in other words, the historical transformation. Its principal objectives were to support political, administrative, intellectual, and cultural leaders in reflecting on culture as a driver of development, to promote endogenous forms of development grounded in the values of each society, and to foster a dialogue among civilizations rather than a simple transfer of Western cultural models. Its educational program sought to explore some of the key relationships that define the human experience: humanity’s relationship with nature, with others, and with the sacred. To this end, it drew upon diverse intellectual and cultural traditions, notably Indian, African, and Islamic ones. The university organized sessions bringing together participants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a spirit of South—South solidarity and the circulation of “non-aligned” forms of knowledge, independent of dominant frameworks of academic production. It thus presented itself as a laboratory for pedagogical experimentation, operating on the margins of conventional university models, where learning was conceived as a process of horizontal transmission and as an instrument of social transformation. From the 1980s onward, however, its ambitions gradually eroded. The institution was officially dissolved in 2005 under Law No. 2005-08 of 22 July. On 3 June 2014, the University of Mutants building in Gorée Island was allocated to serve as the headquarters of the World Foundation for the Memorial and Preservation of Gorée island.
Until November 2023, the building still bore traces of its former activity, with books and scattered documents remaining on the metal shelves of the first-floor library and, in some cases, on the floor itself, including several student dissertations. These dispersed materials provide a concrete material manifestation of one of the article’s central concerns: the ways in which post-Bandung promises (non-aligned pedagogy, the circulation of knowledge, and solidarity among the Global South) survive in the form of fragile traces that are subsequently taken up by contemporary artistic practices. The archive therefore appears not merely as a repository of memory available to the present. It can also be understood as what materially remains after institutional abandonment, what resists erasure while simultaneously bearing the marks of neglect. In this sense, the inhabited ruin is not merely a metaphor: it involves objects, surfaces, deposits, in other words, a vulnerable materiality of memory. For a long time, the site has been undergoing rehabilitation works. Yet the institution continues to be invoked for what it represents: not only because of its historical legacy, but also as a form of “concrete utopia” capable of inspiring contemporary projects in research, art, and activism (Horton, 2024). By adopting the name, the current collective does more than preserve its memory: it extends its symbolic charge and transforms this institutional legacy into a living critical space. Bandung thus reappears as a matrix of anti-imperialist thought and a repertoire of theoretical, artistic, and political experimentation.
These historically charged sites materialize an imaginary of Bandung in which the tension between decay and hope, between ruin and promise, is continually reenacted. This imaginary is not necessarily explicitly claimed by their founders or users. Rather, within the framework of this analysis, these sites make it possible to observe how certain motifs associated with Bandung become materialized, displaced, or unraveled in space.
They crystallize the contradictions of a Pan-African and internationalist project: the aspiration to regenerate colonial remnants through postcolonial utopias left suspended in time. They render visible the tensions between promises of modernity, emancipation, and solidarity on the one hand, and fragile or abandoned infrastructures on the other. Their present condition therefore signifies more than material deterioration; it also bears witness to the gaps between post-independence modernizing ambitions, institutional discontinuities, and contemporary forms of critical reappropriation.
Originally conceived as possible supports for an alternative future, these infrastructures now appear as “ruins of utopias”, to borrow the expression of Jong and Quinn (2014): unfinished remnants that nevertheless remain capable of generating new interpretations, new uses, and new political projections. The ambition of cultural multilateralism in the Global South, once championed by these projects, is at times neglected and at other times reclaimed at the local level: in the practices of a beekeeper established in Ponty, or in the everyday uses of space by the inhabitants of Gorée, the remnants of an unfinished collective dream continue, quietly, to be reenacted.
From Bandung to Gorée: Mapping Mutating Utopias and Erased Diplomacies
The École des Mutants collective does not extend the legacies of Bandung through direct lineage, but through the reactivation of political motifs associated with it: Afro-Asian solidarities, tricontinental imaginaries, non-alignment, and critiques of postcolonial diplomacies. By Afro-Asian solidarities, we refer here to the political, cultural, and intellectual alliances forged among movements, states, and actors across Africa and Asia in the wake of anti-colonial struggles, rather than to any homogeneous belonging to an Asian or African entity. The collective’s participation in the Taipei Biennial (2020) does not simply constitute a return of Bandung to “Asia”, it reactivates a more situated thread of memory linked to diplomatic relations between Taiwan and certain African states, particularly Senegal, where the African Future University became one of the focal points of this relationship through Taiwanese funding in 2005.
One of the major starting points of this memory-based inquiry lies in the hardly-known relationship between Taiwan and Senegal, particularly through the initial funding of the African Future University (AFU) by Taiwanese diplomacy. This relationship, now discontinued, materialized through a series of concrete and sometimes unexpected collaborations, such as the introduction of asparagus cultivation in the Niayes region in the early 2000s. Led by the Taiwan Agricultural Technical Mission, the project sought to develop an export-oriented agricultural sector targeting European markets. It was even showcased during President Chen Shui-bian’s visit to Sangalkam in 2002, alongside Abdoulaye Wade. It is precisely this marginal history that the École des Mutants collective, through Mo (2020), explores in the research project entitled A Tale of Asparagus. The investigation documents an attempt at agricultural diplomacy, revealing the postcolonial entanglements of technology, ecology, development, and the geopolitics of the Global South.
Through a composite installation combining archives, batiks, and visual narratives, the collective weaves a network of correspondences between Bandung, Gorée, and Keelung, bringing to light echoes and circulations that have long remained in the background. The exhibition thus becomes both a space of inquiry and a site of reinvention. Such an approach can be clarified by Hal Foster’s reflections on the archive in contemporary art, insofar as it does not seek to restore an intact past or fill every gap in the historical narrative, but rather to establish connections among heterogeneous and dispersed fragments, incomplete traces, and disjointed materialities. The archive becomes a process of assemblage rather than preservation, as it renders uncertain connections physically present and generates new forms of intelligibility by transforming scattered remnants into a critical apparatus. The artistic gesture therefore does not merely illustrate memory, but it tests it, displaces it, and experiments with it as an ongoing process.
From this perspective, Shimazu’s (2014) analysis offers a particularly insightful understanding of the performative dimensions of Bandung. She interprets the conference as a form of diplomatic staging, in which the scenography of power, the symbols of regained sovereignty, and the protocols of statecraft produced a political spectacle laden with ambiguities. She talks about “diplomacy as theatre”, emphasizing the extent to which Bandung also functioned as a space of collective illusions, overinvested hopes, and deferred futures, effects that continue to resonate throughout the postcolonial history of major South—South cooperation projects. The École des Mutants collective situates itself within this critical lineage by taking the remnants of these international dramaturgies and transforming them into material for aesthetic and political speculation on unfinished utopias. This shift from historical analysis to a curatorial rereading of unfulfilled promises allows Bandung to be understood as a reconfigurable stage upon which tensions between myth and memory, strategy and the desire for transformation, continue to be reenacted.
Through the ruins, archives, and narratives it assembles, the project becomes a cartography of transformations: it reconstructs an atlas of erased worlds, interrupted diplomacies, and forms of life in resistance. Extending Bruno Latour’s reflections (Facing Gaia, 2015), these “multiplied worlds” embody the persistence of fragmentary utopias that resist both the closure of linear time and the geography of power. The gesture of the Mutants thus interrogates the possibility of a collective becoming, in dialogue with Glissant’s conceptions of creolization and the Tout-Monde (Poetics of Relation, 1990; Treatise on the Whole-World, 1997), where heterogeneity becomes a principle of invention.
Within this weaving of archives, fictions, and material traces, ruins no longer merely signify an ending. They become thresholds, points of support, operators of recomposition, and sites from which the imaginaries of the Global South find renewed vitality. Not as objects of nostalgia, but as orientations toward what remains to be invented. The 1955 conference thus becomes a fertile geopolitical fiction, capable of sustaining situated, poetic, and insubordinate narratives.
Likewise, the École des Mutants collective mobilizes the speculative power of storytelling (drawing on figures such as Octavia Butler, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Edward Said) to imagine a post-Bandung world in which unfinished dreams become the foundation for a diplomacy of imagined possibilities. Bandung no longer appears as a relic, but as an inhabited ruin that speaks, breathes, and comes alive through the invisible alliances it continues to inspire. The collective does not simply lament the collapse of utopias; it reclaims their fragments, displaces them, and sets them back into circulation. In doing so, it extends the spirit of Bandung as a critical, aesthetic, and relational principle in constant motion, documenting the forgotten forms of postcolonial universalism and the transformations of its promise.
In this resonance, the collective itself becomes another space, a laboratory of archives and possible political reinvention, as a critical repertoire; a lever for producing counter-narratives, reconnecting post–Cold War peripheries and recovering the loosened threads of Afro-Asian solidarities through a gesture that is both archaeological and prospective. While the practice of the collective École des Mutants occupies a central place here because of the reflective density of its dispositifs, it is not the only artistic practice to revisit, from Dakar or from trajectories connected to the African continent, the legacies of Bandung. Other contemporary practices similarly extend or reconfigure some of its motifs, whether in relation to symbolic sovereignty, material archives, South—South circulations, or the memory of decolonial utopias.
Other contemporary artistic practices also prolong motifs associated with Bandung, particularly symbolic sovereignty, critiques of colonial legacies, and the recomposition of pan-African imaginaries. The work of Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, especially his project Laboratoire de Déberlinisation (created in Berlin in 2001), extends also a pan-African reflection on economic and cultural sovereignty by transforming art into an instrument of symbolic diplomacy. The projects of Mansour Ciss Kanakassy such as L’Afro, Global Pass, or Les Timbres operate through a critical subversion of monetary, administrative, and political codes inherited from colonialism. By relocating these codes into the realm of art, the artist opens a space of imagination in which aspirations for unity, sovereignty, and resistance can be reformulated. Attentive to the possibilities offered by contemporary technologies, his practice turns artistic creation into a tool of collective emancipation as well as civic education, calling upon African youth to participate actively in shaping their own futures.
For her part, Jihan El Tahri extends this reflection on the political genealogies of the Global South through Threading Solidarity, presented at the Ljubljana Biennale in 2023, where she traces a sensitive archaeology of the Afro-Asian solidarities that emerged from Bandung. Through an assemblage of archives, textiles, videos, and fragmented photographs, she excavates the erased narratives of the 1955 conference and that of the Tricontinental movement, revealing the friendships, gestures, and utopian aspirations that underpinned non-alignment. By interweaving the trajectories of cotton between India and Egypt, and by reinscribing the materiality of fabric as a political archive, she constructs a poetic and critical counter-history of independence movements. According to Jihan El Tahri, the legacy of Bandung was partially appropriated or marginalized by the neoliberal logics of the 1980s and 1990s, but, for the artist, solidarity continued to evolve through the concentric circles that Nasser talks about in his inaugural address: Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, and Pan-Islamism[15]. While Ciss portrays currency and mobility as instruments of sovereignty, El Tahri reconstructs the memory of solidarities and the fragilities of the postcolonial dream. Together, their works extend Bandung as a living myth, an aesthetic, critical, and relational space.
Continuities and Discontinuities Across the Continent and in Senegal
The continuities of Bandung are expressed through a dense fabric of symbolic and political resonances, both across the African continent and in Senegal. Yet these continuities should not obscure several major discontinuities. The contemporary reactivation of Bandung does not occur through a process of linear transmission, nor within the framework of an unchanged political project. The collective promotion of decolonization by newly independent states has given way to often fragmented revivals, led by artists, collectives, curators, and cultural spaces caught up in other power dynamics. The shift is therefore twofold: from a geopolitical imaginary of solidarity among states to situated forms of cultural cooperation, and from an aspiration toward sovereignty to critical practices confronting neoliberalization, extractivism, and the enduring asymmetries of the global art world. It is precisely within this gap between symbolic continuity and historical discontinuity that Bandung’s contemporary relevance resides.
At the continental level, the 1955 conference marked the international recognition of the “right of peoples and nations to self-determination” (Final statement of the Asian-African Conference, 1955). It fosters the defense of a united and free Africa and contributed to the legitimization of African anti-colonial struggles by strengthening international support for liberation movements across the continent, from Algeria to Kenya, from Southern Africa to Ghana. Its principles of sovereignty, cooperation, and non-interference nourished the political Pan-Africanism embodied by figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Modibo Keïta, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Patrice Lumumba, and inspired the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. Bandung served as a key reference point for the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra[16], which constituted an almost direct translation, while Afro-Asian alliances inaugurated an unprecedented cycle of political, military, cultural, and educational cooperation among states[17], liberation movements, and institutions emerging from decolonization. Bandung thus made conceivable forms of transnational circulation and solidarity that would later be appropriated, transformed, and reformulated in different historical contexts.
This legacy, however, is far from being solely political; it is equally aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural. Bandung inspired an imaginary in which militant cinema, committed literature, and Pan-African cultural institutions became vehicles for an alternative modernity. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon called for moving beyond symbolic solidarity in order to construct a revolutionary project grounded in the politicization of colonized peoples. Nkrumah expands on some of these principles in Africa Must Unite (1963) and Neo-Colonialism (1965), drawing upon them to advocate African unity and non-alignment. In the work of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the reference appears through his reflections on the dialogue of cultures and the Civilization of the Universal, which articulate a vision akin to an African humanism open to the plurality of civilizations (Senghor, 1961, 1977, 1993). Amílcar Cabral, in Unity and Struggle (1979), emphasized the central role of culture within liberation movements. Samir Amin, an economist and world-systems theorist, often refers to this in Unequal Development (1973), in which he situates the process of independence within a broader critique of dependency and the global economic order. More recently, the reflections of Achille Mbembe and Souleymane Bachir Diagne have revisited these questions from new perspectives, exploring the conditions for a decentered, plural, and translated universalism (Diagne, 2022, 2024; Mbembe, 2010).
Bandung as a Critical Repertoire: Survivals, Recompositions, and Unfinished Futures
Although Senegal, still under French colonial rule in 1955, did not participate directly in the Bandung Conference, the event nevertheless became an important reference point for the political, intellectual, and cultural trajectories that accompanied the country’s path toward independence. In the Senegalese context, this imaginary contributed to strengthening aspirations for independence, fostering a Pan-African and Third-Worldist consciousness among Senegalese elites (from Lamine Guèye to Léopold Sédar Senghor) and inspiring a generation of politically engaged youth motivated by the ideal of collective emancipation. Following independence, Senegal adopted a position of measured non-alignment, less radical than that of several other African states. Its participation in a number of Non-Aligned Movement meetings, including the Belgrade Conference in 1961, as well as the development of privileged relations with India, China, Egypt, and Cuba through South—South cultural and educational cooperation, reflected a desire to engage in political and symbolic circulations that extended beyond the Franco-African framework.
Driven simultaneously by the ideals of Bandung, the philosophy of Négritude, and a proactive cultural diplomacy policy, the Senghorian project transformed Dakar into a major center of artistic and intellectual projection from Africa. The First World Festival of Black Arts in 1966 remains one of its most visible moments to affirm an African humanism grounded in the dialogue of civilizations while embedding this ambition within a highly centralized state project. Dakar, which has become a “global arts city”, and the institutions that shaped its artistic scene (IFAN, the National School of Arts, the Dynamic Museum, and later Dak’Art) contributed to the consolidation of knowledge, training, and the circulation of art from Dakar. Yet this artistic ecosystem has also been shaped by tensions between: colonial legacies and the affirmation of cultural autonomy, between national diplomacy and artistic experimentation, and between institutional recognition and critical or independent practices. It is in these discrepancies, rather than in a smooth continuity, that we might interpret Dakar’s role as a space conducive to the reimagining of post-Bandung narratives.
Bandung embodies a decentralized cosmopolitanism that can be compared to globality in Glissant’s sense of the term, not one that homogenizes, but a conception of Relation, that is attentive to circulations, opacities, and encounters between situated histories (Glissant, 1990, 1997). In contemporary Senegalese creation, this orientation is manifested not only through the participation of Dakar-based spaces in transnational networks, but also through concrete practices of research, translation, residencies, counter-archiving, and curatorial collaboration that challenge Euro-North American frameworks of legitimacy. Since 2013, Ker Thiossane and RAW Material Company have demonstrated a particular commitment to alliances beyond Euro-North American circuits by joining, for example, the Arts Collaboratory network, through which shared reflections and research have mutually informed one another. Galerie OH was also part of an online platform designed by Liza Essers (the South South network), owner of the Goodman Gallery, in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Initiatives like these have privileged forms of cooperation grounded in the exchange of methodologies, the collective production of knowledge, and attentiveness to local contexts, rather than merely facilitating the international circulation of artists. Bandung’s legacy is therefore not expressed through direct institutional continuity but rather as a way of imagining situated alliances among the Global South, where relationships matter as much as representation.
As a landmark in the critique of epistemic colonialism, Bandung also remains an important reference point within decolonial epistemologies. Artists participate in what Mamadou Diouf[18] describes as a process of “vernacularization”, encompassing efforts to revalorize local knowledges, oral narratives, marginalized memories, and endogenous practices. This is the case in the curatorial approaches adopted by several institutions such as RAW Material Company, the Théodore Monod Museum of IFAN, the ASM Fund, and numerous spontaneous initiatives that engage with archives and personal memories.
This story cannot be read as a linear or homogeneous narrative. Contemporary historiographical and theoretical reinterpretations by Robert Vitalis, Christopher Lee, and Adom Getachew remind us that the conference was an event marked by tensions and contradictions: it was as much a diplomatic occasion as it was mythological construct, as much a symbol of emancipation as it was an unfinished project. It is precisely within these discrepancies, in the gray areas and gaps in its legacy that its critical revival is now taking place. In Senegal, initiatives such as the École des Mutants collective do not merely commemorate Bandung; they transform its remnants into spaces of inquiry, assembly, and collective speculation. Rather than elevating Bandung into a glorious myth, they approach it as an aesthetic and political compass, as a diplomacy of possibility, and as a critical repertoire for thinking shared agency in a fractured world. Bandung thus emerges as an inhabited ruin: not only marked by the traces of a partially disappointed hope, but also by the sedimentation of promises, abandonments, and power relations whose material, affective, and political dimensions artists are reactivating today.
Far from a teleological interpretation, this research therefore invites us to consider Bandung not as a historical relic, nor as a mere object of commemoration, but as a principle of political and poetic expression, that remain active today, persisting in ever-changing forms. Like other foundational events that are repeatedly reactivated within anticolonial and diasporic imaginaries, such as the Haitian Revolution of 1804, interpreted as a historical rupture, a matrix of Black freedom, and an unfinished horizon of emancipation (James, 1938; Trouillot, 1995; Dubois, 2004), Bandung derives its significance from the successive ways in which it is mobilized and reinterpreted. In contemporary Senegalese practices, or in practices developed from Dakar, Bandung does not return as a fixed reference. Contemporary artists do not merely invoke it. They revisit it, work through it, interpret it, displace it, and at times even contradict it. In doing so, they extend less linear inheritance than they probe its latent potential by reopening buried archives, reimagining the cartographies of the world, and articulating alternative solidarities that escape dominant geopolitical frameworks.
Bandung no longer refers solely to an event in Afro-Asian diplomatic history. It has become a critical and aesthetic framework, a fertile geopolitical fiction for thinking, from the perspectives of the Global South, the plurality of unfinished worlds still in the making. Its relevance lies in its capacity to generate acts of reconfiguration in the face of the failures of postcolonial promises, in this fruitful tension between unfinished utopia and situated reactivation. Far from having disappeared, the Bandung imaginary continues to shape forms of collective agency that are seeking themselves, taking shape, and reinventing themselves in the present.