Olja Triaska Stefanovic - (non) monuments to the non aligned

2022 - 2023

“The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) functioned as a social movement in the international system, a third way between two blocs, aiming to change the existing global structures and to create a more just, equal and peaceful world order. It was, in its essence, an anti-imperialist, anticolonial and antiracist movement” (Singham & Hune, Non-Alignment in an Age of Alignments, 1986)

I was born and grew up in the former Yugoslavia, in the country that was geographically in the ‘East’, psychologically in the ‘West’ but geo-politically non-aligned. In this atmosphere and setting, my parent’s generation grew up adjacent to the Iron Curtain, in a ‘market socialist’ economy yet culturally oriented towards European and America popular forms. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) aimed to creatively contribute to an alternative to the existing world order and represented the first major disruption of the Cold World map. It embodied a quest for alternative political alliances, for an “alternative mundialization”. As a transnational political project, it was a coalition of small and middle-sized states, mostly former colonies and developing countries from the Global South and advocated for peaceful coexistence, disarmament, territorial integrity, and supporting anti-colonial struggles. Different collaborations and exchanges were established between non-aligned countries in the field of economics, trade, education and culture. Yugoslavia, as one of the founders of the NAM, participated in those processes and significantly contributed to its policies and activities.

My project takes as a backdrop a search for the (non) monuments to the Non-Aligned, that inspired geo-political project undertaken by Josip Broz Tito, president of former Yugoslavia. Through archival images, documents and a photographic essay featuring images from New York, San Francisco, Belgrade, and Berlin, this visual essay explores the tension between the realpolitik of the Cold War, its remnants and traces in the built environment, images, etc., and those of this utopic and ambitious project but one which is much less recognisable since its heyday in the 1960s.
This is an introduction of the larger visual research that mix the architectural, political and the autobiographical that will be later presented in the form of book in 2024

Behind and Around of the Non-Aligned

Cold War

Nike Missile Sites

Surveillance

The Space Race

United Nations

Cold War

Nike Missile Sites

Kennedy, Tito, Daddy and Me Video, 6min 2023

Telephone Recording #1: Dictation Belt 28A.1. Tito’s New York Trip, 24 October 1963, Contributor(s): Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 Tito, Josip Broz, 1892-1980 Description: Sound recording of a telephone conversation held on October 24, 1963, between President John F. Kennedy and President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. They discuss President Tito’s trip to New York. Source: The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Archives

Title: Press Conference, 30 August 1961 Contributor(s): Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 Description: Sound recording of the President’s News Conference of August 30, 1961 (News Conference 16). The President reads the text of his message to the conference of unaligned states scheduled to convene in Belgrade on September 1, 1961. Source: The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Archives