Digital reconstruction of photographs from Presidential Press Service archive of Conference of Heads of State or Governments of Non-Aligned Countries.
How to envision a climate of thought? How to invoke the material dimensions of a gathering of certain figures at specific moments? Of diplomatic forces concentrated upon the writing of a collective proposal? An unstable and illegible proposal drafted within and against Imperialism’s division of the earth?
What happens when you try, speculatively, to collapse the public presence of a world political project onto a two dimensional plane? Instead of striving to animate details that are supposed to lie behind us, try giving up. Imagine what ensues when elements from the thick textures of history emerge in the forms of glances and postures? When the glint of an ashtray and the base of a vase, the foot of a heavy chair and the carpet that placates, when footnotes filtered and subtitles sifted from the pages of journals and the edges of photographs taken during September 1961 and its aftermaths are allowed to fall back.
To give themselves up to flatness and fatalism. To become décor, if not decoration. To imply allusion and to hint at intimation. To take on a temporal simultaneity, in which a public summit is orchestrated as a series of encrypted ornaments. What happens when exposure is occluded? When evidence becomes anarchival? When a shadow archive is illuminated by the penumbra of a pax atomica?
Gather round me, my writers, musicians, artists: my name is NAM is informed by the idea that the collective statement articulated as a call for a new kind of internationalism by the 25 delegates of the first Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade, September 1961, remains unanswered.
It enquires into the possibilities of ‘prolonging’ the formation of the NAM into the social conditions of the present. The NAM can be understood as a third space of emancipation that sought to unsettle the bipolar world order through a wide variety of anti-colonial thinking.
Photographs from Presidential Press Service archive of Conference of Heads of State or Governments of Non-Aligned Countries, 1–5 September 1961, Belgrade.
Dimensions variable (originally 1400cm x 440 cm sq)
