Nonaligned Echoes, Gifts and Returns

N. – Let’s start our conversation by drawing a map of your journey to Podgorica. We connected through your interest and research into the history of the Non-Aligned Movement.

How did this research begin, and how did you come across the topic of the Non-Aligned Movement?

S.D:  I heard some interviews with the historian Vijay Prashad where he was talking about the Non-Aligned Movement when his book came out in 2007, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World which puts the Movement into the complex history of decolonization and global geopolitics.  In 2008 I met the artist Ana Prvacki (now my wife) who was born in Yugoslavia.  I realized I knew nothing about Eastern Europe and through researching the history of the Balkans I also came across the NonAligned movement in a more personal way.

N: You were in your mid-twenties, in USA when the “Iron Curtain fell” and the “Wind of Change” was whistling. Were you familiar with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) at that time? As an artist who explores history, how does that moment and everything that followed appear to you today?

No I wasn”t aware of the Nonaligned Movement in 1989-90,  I wish I had been.  My focus at that time was on class and labor within the US context, I worked in the building trades for many years and that was how I came into making sculpture.  The tragic mistakes of the Nato block financial and business institutions is more than evident today, I was aware in the mid-nineties that this would happen, so many economists and of course many of the people in the countries predicted exactly the outcomes we currently live with.  Anyone with half a brain could see that the neoliberal ultra rapid privatization schemes and policies of the World Bank, IMF and the big financial companies was going to result in disaster.  It could have been different, there could have been a Marshall Plan for East Europe and Russia.  Or both the Nato block and the former Warsaw pact countries could have met as equals to determine the best path forward, with the Nonaligned Movement as a model of state to state cooperation and mutual aid.  And that example is what I am interested in bringing forward in the search for alternatives now that nearly everyone acknowledges the utter failure of neoliberalism.

N: In your work, history plays a significant role, particularly the aspects that are not represented in the central narrative. What drew you to the study of the Non-Aligned Movement, and what motivated you to delve deeper into this research?

Most of my work had been dealing with U.S. history, with the civil rights, the labor movement and native american rights struggles.  In 2005 I made a book of the work of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas and a lot of his work was about international solidarity movements, Pan Africanism, solidarity with struggles all over the world, in Chile, Cuba, China, and Vietnam of course.  So this led me into becoming more international in my interests and the Non-Aligned Movement in particular because it included Europe, in the form of Yugoslavia, Cyprus and Malta, into a non-hierarchical affiliation with the newly independent countries of the Third World.

N: Your research on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has also led you to the legacy of the former Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito.” In the exhibition, you propose this place and its knowledge as a starting point for a collective imaginizing of the alternative worlds. What do you see in the ideas offered by NAM, as well as in the collection we have in Podgorica, that could contribute to healing a world that has fallen ill?

I also love the fact of the Nonaligned art collection, it shows that we need beauty and poetry as well as social and economic security.  Bread and roses!  It is a concrete example of the importance of art in building a flourishing society.  It has been such an interesting experience spending time looking at the works, talking with you and the curators, getting some of the stories behind the works.  Really fascinating.  And by chance the collection contains a painting by my father in law, Milenko Prvacki.  It was very touching to find it there!

N:  It appears that in the past decade, a significant portion of contemporary art has shifted its focus toward archives and history, abandoning the role of the “fortune teller.” How do you perceive the role of art in the production of knowledge and meaning today?

Interesting question!  My views on art’s role in society have evolved over the years.  At the moment I think Herbert Marcuse’s theory of aesthetics seems the most realistic.  Broadly speaking the idea is that good or great art can reveal the world as it truly is and it does this by making the familiar somehow strange or different.  Ideally this technique can help us to see what is normally hidden behind the ideological screen of the status quo, or what you might call everyday reality.  In popular culture art would be like the “red pill”.  Rather than expecting art to have the power to effect social or political change I see art as having the potential to effect individuals who then might be part of social or political movement toward a less repressive reality.

N: Your work is, to a great extent, about revealing the world as it (truly) is; it also seems to be a diary of your learning and observations, where you underline, quote, and highlight details that might be significant as reminders of blurred ethics or signposts toward hope. In the cycle that deals with the Non-Aligned Movement, however, you open a process toward the collective, the procedural, and toward an inspiring exchange. Can you tell me something about this component of collective work and sharing?

Through the symbolic action of making models of sculptures and monuments for the Petrovic Park and the nonaligned movement I’m inviting visitors to play, to imagine something that does not yet exist.  While these gestures may seem small and seemingly insignificant the process might spur thinking about the future as something more open.  The landscape model shows something as it is, Petrovic Park,  but as a small scale model it presents that park in a very different way..  The viewer suddenly has a different relationship to what they know from everyday life.  When they add their own creation to the model they have changed reality, perhaps only symbolically at first but a door has also been opened to something larger

N: In this work, you invite the audience to join and engage through a participatory process. What, in your opinion, would be the ideal future of this work and process?

Since the work now belongs to the collection in Podgorica every time it is exhibited it will be reactivated and can again ask for viewers to imagine and create. I hope that it can also travel to other places for exhibition and be seen in new contexts. Perhaps it can be exhibited in some of the countries that were originators of the Nonaligned Movement like Egypt, India, Ghana, Indonesia, etc. The visitors who make their own sculptures for the project can choose to leave them with the art work and have their names added as co-creators of the work.  I hope that it will continue to grow and evolve as more people add their works.