Southern Constellations: Arts and culture within the Non-aligned movement and what to do with this legacy today 

Between 1 and 6 September 1961 the representatives (all men with the exception of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka) from twenty-five politically diverse states gathered in Belgrade; it was the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). It was a grand event, a meeting of mostly former colonies from the global South and Yugoslavia. The conference was also an attempt to create an alternative transnational political alliance, a third way between the two blocs, aiming to change the existing global structures and to create a more just, equal and peaceful world order. The movement very early on declared itself as anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-racist, following principles such as peaceful co-existence, respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-interference in domestic affairs, equality and mutual benefit. Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana pointed out what seemed like the movement’s essence: “We face neither East nor West; we face forward.”
After the initial years the NAM transformed itself from being distinctly political to a movement with a strong economic and cultural agenda. In regard to the last it was mainly concerned with cultural imperialism, restitution and cultural exchanges. Interpreted from today’s point of view this quest also envisioned rewriting historical narratives; the emphasis was put on altering epistemic colonialism and cultural dependency. Consequently art and culture were primarily about politics and history, and an attempt to pluralize the experiences of modernity in the non-western parts of the world. It seems the movement was aware of that fact that only this way it could enter the world’s (cultural) space on equal footing. The motto was to make the global South a place from which to speak.
The presentation will focus on the exhibition Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned that was shown in Moderna galerija, Ljubljana in 2019 and Asia Culture Center Gwangju, South Korea in 2020. The exhibition was a result of long term research on the NAM, more specifically on its cultural politics and the role art and culture played within the movement. The exhibition emphasized the ideas, ideals and principles of the non-aligned movement particularly in close connection with its cultural policies and place them in a contemporary context with the question: Could there be a non-aligned contemporaneity? The focus was on the way the “southern constellations” envisioned forms of politics that took as their starting point the life of peoples and societies that had been forcibly relegated to the margins of the global economic, political and cultural system.