Feathers, Fur, and Flags
2023-2025
Exotic Gifts, Hunting Rituals, and the Performance of Power
This visual research project explores how animals — as diplomatic gifts, hunting trophies, and living symbols — became tools of soft power within the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. Focusing on Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito’s passion for collecting exotic animals and his participation in state-sponsored hunting rituals, the project reveals how cultural diplomacy extended beyond protocol into the realms of spectacle, performance, and desire. Growing up in Vojvodina, Yugoslavia — a region where state-organized hunts often took place and where the echoes of Tito’s presence and political theatre were woven into the everyday landscape of my family history, influenced my exploration of animal diplomacy and the cultural politics of the Cold War as the rituals of power and spectacle. Drawing on archival photographs, film footage, and contemporary imagery, the project assembles visual montages that trace how animals moved across borders as political messengers — wild emissaries in a complex theatre of global solidarity. By unpacking the symbolic role of these gestures, Feathers, Fur, and Flags reframes Tito’s menagerie not as a curiosity, but as a living monument t — and often contradictory — vision of alternative mondialization.
Multimedia installation: Video, Photography, Sound and archive material
