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Dispatch: Notes on (de)growth from the fragments of Yugoslavia's former alliances

Ava Zevop
 

In her dispatch from 'Summer School: Our Many Easts' artist and researcher Ava Zevop reflects on the recurring presence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) within the programme. Through the writing of critical race theorist Ezekiel Dixon-Román, the practice of Krater collective, as well as her own research, she ponders the question of degrowth and the "lost potentialities" of NAM.

The view from Krater production space – located in a dormant construction site – in the city of Ljubljana. Photo: Ava Zevop

At the summer school ‘Our Many Easts’, the history of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) took an important role in queering West-South relations. This brings my thoughts back to the words of Ezekiel Dixon-Román, critical race and media theorist, on progress, development and difference, and consolidates the fragments of Yugoslavia’s former diplomatic and economic alliances – that I have been encountering in the recent years – into a reflection on (de)growth.
 
In a research group I am involved in exploring post-colonial and post-socialist encounters in art discourse and infrastructure between Lithuania and Slovenia, we have been privileging encounters as a form of knowledge production. During ‘Our Many Easts’, it is the encounter with Dubravka Sekulić, and her research on Energoprojekt that captures my interest in the lives of “growth”, “progress” and “development” within the Non-Alignment discourse – as she outlines the relations between the shifting policy of the UN and the internal pressures of the Yugoslav markets. Previously in Rijeka, another encounter with a group of Sino-Yugoslav researchers – who are tracing the history of Yugoslav-Chinese exchanges and their legacies and afterlives – gave me another entry point to think through the changing relations between these two regions in terms of development, and its past and present discursive manifestations. In the first of a series of encounters, I met Dutch-Yugoslav hacker, activist, and lecturer Vesna Manojlovic in Linz. In her lecture on the ‘Internet of the Ecocide’, she quotes Roland Ngam who said “Seven billion are already degrown”, and later she sparks my interest in the environmental politics of the Non-Aligned Movement – or lack thereof.
 
According to Dixon-Román, it is ‘time, history, and space (as demarcated by geographic context), or more specifically development’ that ‘became the necessary descriptors in the formations of sameness and difference as well as economic conditions, social conditions, human capacities, and even frameworks that inform social policies and practices of governance’. Dixon-Román claims, in relation to technology, that it is in part due to assumptions of development, progress, and narratives of cultural difference that racial logics becomes embedded within its discourse.
 
In the history of the Non-Aligned Movement, the notion of (under)development seems to not only hold many contradictory tensions but takes the role of a scapegoat in issues of global inequality, and power imbalance. As stated by Paul Stubbs, Yugoslavia existed as a project of “modernization otherwise”, with NAM as “globalization otherwise”. As we visit the local environmental initiative Krater the next day, I wonder about the lost potentialities for ecological justice within the project of Non-Alignment and what that means for the possibilities of “Non-Alignment otherwise”.

A vine coming through the window in the kitchen of the summer school accommodation. Photo: Ava Zevop

Forest Encounters with Urška Jurman, Mateja Kurir, Polonca Lovšin, part of the Summer School ‘Our Many Easts’. Photo: Ava Zevop

Mladi Levi Festival: Shared Landscapes, seven pieces between fields and forests. Photo: Ava Zevop

A (forgotten) private orchard near Ljubljana. Photo: Ava Zevop

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