Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned

"Yes, now I’m part of a project now led by Ljiljana Kolešnik, where we’re looking at cultural exchange in the Non-Aligned Movement. I’m the person who’s doing the political economy work, but these are mainly art historians or architects, who are looking at how the Non-Aligned Movement, both formally from above, but also, informally from below, created the possibilities for new kinds of exchanges between socialist Yugoslavia and what was called the Third World, or the Global South—through art, music, folklore, student exchanges, architecture, and so on. This book is a beautiful catalogue, but it also has a series of academic essays on the traces that that this cultural exchange left behind. I was recently on the island of Korčula in Croatia. In 1968, 1970 and 1972, Korčula had three summer art colonies. And in one of them—I think the last one—a Cuban architect came with this amazing idea that was never realized: a hotel that would be this surrealist complex of a body. There would be a heart and brain that would go into the sea. And there was an idea to realize this as a project. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So there were extraordinarily interesting cultural exchanges, architectural exchanges. Bojana and Djordje Balmazović have, in my new edited book, a kind of pictorial essay where they look at some of these stories. Djordje does some beautiful drawings, which is in the spirit of popularizing cultural exchange. The comic book form was very important in Yugoslavia. So it’s a lovely book of an exhibition that started in Ljubljana, but it’s still travelling around and really worth looking at. There are other books by Bojana Videkanić, who also writes in my book. She has a lovely book on socialist modernism, where she looks, amongst other themes, at the Ljubljana biennials as a source of cultural exchange . The issue for me is that a lot of Yugoslav formal and elitist understandings of culture had a very Western notion of modernity. But the Non-Aligned Movement and the things that the two Bojanas in my edited book refer to are ‘other modernities’ and they address the importance of those kinds of emerging art movements in the Global South."