War, Peace and Image Politics: Part 1, Who Has a Right to These Images?

Today, it often feels like the struggle is not performed in the name of the present, but in the name of the past. And whenever we speak about the past, there can be a tendency towards nostalgia, to speak of the ‘good old times’ – the phenomenon that Svetlana Boym described as ‘the history without guilt.’11.Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2021, p. 21.

Many contemporary projects dealing with the histories of non-alignment and socialism speak of these histories in apologetic and melancholic tones, evoking idealized images of a better past to challenge the present and its effects of reactionary historical revisionism, post-historical fictions (reconstructive spectacles), and amnesia induced by technological and informational acceleration. However, other projects reflect on the failures and unfulfilled promises of these emancipatory histories, opening up space for more differentiated, critical and less-nostalgic attitudes to the past.

In the essay-book On Neutrality: Letter from Melos (2016) we juxtaposed the notions of active neutrality and political peace, used by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in its international positioning, with contemporary forms of neutralization in conflict management – so-called normalization – with the latter held as a constitutive element of permanent war.22.Jelena Vesić, Rachel O’Reilly, Vladimir Jerić Vlidi, On Neutrality: The Letter From Melos, Non-Aligned Modernisms series, Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016.

Conflicts today do not lead towards the resolution of disputed situations but serve to maintain or perpetuate stagnant crises. Giorgio Agamben evokes the Greek term stasis, which means both civil war and immutability – a civil war that is unresolved and drags on.33.Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (trans. Nicholas Heron), Stanford University Press, 2015.

Although neutrality as a political concept primarily means not taking part in a war, it gets quite complex as the term continues to be utilized across progressive, conservative, legal-normative and revolutionary identifications. In the political terminology of NAM, active neutrality or politicized neutrality became synonymous with independent politics, (national) sovereignty, friendship and solidarity. Kwame Nkrumah wrote: ‘Our politics of positive neutrality is not passive or neutral politics – this is affirmative politics based on our firm belief in positive action.’44.Kwame Nkrumah, 2 September 1961, United Kingdom: National Archives, Kew, Public Record Office FO 371/161222. 

The politics of active neutrality was opposed to the Euro-Atlantic juridical management of neutralism as well as the Western ideology of peace, while at the same time introducing something new and unexpected. This can be summarized in the thesis of a non-aligned third position, and in the nuanced neither/nor dialectics reflected by Yugoslav politician and architect of socialist self-management Edvard Kardelj in his Historical Roots of Non-Alignment (1975).55.Edvard Kardelj, Istorijski koreni nesvrstavanja, Marksističke Studije Vol. 1, Beograd: Komunist, 1975. For Kardelj, the two-fold negation of the power blocs did not imply reaching a point of ideal equidistance from the existing centres of power, but countering the power politics as such.

This negation of power politics, symbolically captured by both the historic Bandung Afro-Asian conference of 1955 and the conference of Non-Aligned Countries in Belgrade 1961, marked a movement from the bipolar condition of the Cold War towards a wholly novel situation, as the emerging forces of new and socialist nations articulated the project of political peace as a form of collective solidarity.

In his essay ‘Images of Non-Aligned and Tricontinental Struggles’, film historian and critic Olivier Hadouchi observes images of guerrilla fighters (the partisans of liberation wars, of wars for independence) figuring as images of solidarity.66.Olivier Hadouchi, Images of Non-Aligned and Tricontinental Struggles, Non-Aligned Modernisms series, Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016. He finds examples of such imagery in pictures from the anti-fascist peoples’ liberation struggle of the Yugoslav Partisans in World War II, in photographs of guerrilla fighters in the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), and in images of guerrilla political movements in Latin America during the 1970s.

The militant Tricontinental movement appeared on the margins of NAM to promote the unity and sovereignty of the Third World, inspired by the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Ho Chi Min and Ernesto Che Guevara. The first Tricontinental Conference, held in Havana in January 1966, gathered together various African, Asian and Latin American nations and revolutionary movements of the Latin American subcontinent. For both movements – Tricontinental and Non-Aligned – the common desire was to give representation to the Third World and to create ties between their countries. Many cultural workers from NAM countries (reporters, photographers, film directors and film-makers) contributed to spreading the true picture of the Third World’s struggle for freedom. The movement of Third Cinema (Tercer Cine) played a big role in that context, confronting the traditions of Hollywood and European cinema. For example, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s documentary La hora de los hornos / The Hour of the Furnaces: Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation (1968), which includes archival material (newsreels) and testimonies of Peronist resistance fighters, intellectuals and university leaders, directly participates in the reality of the revolutionary moment in Argentina. The film trilogy The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of an Unarmed People (1975–79) by Patricio Guzmán is another example of cinema vérité in which the camera person performs the act of filming real objects, people and events in a confrontational way, capturing the interaction between the film-makers and their subjects in a documentary essay-film style.

The term ‘Third World’ was coined in 1952 by the demographer Alfred Sauvy, who was inspired by the social-class concept of the ‘Third Estate’. 77.Alfred Sauvy, ‘Trois mondes, une planète’, L’Observateur, 14 August 1952.  Prior to the French bourgeois revolution, in contrast to the nobility and clergy, those belonging to the Third Estate ‘counted for nothing’ on the political stage, and ‘desired to be something.’88.Hadouchi, Images of Non-Aligned and Tricontinental Struggles, p. vii. The Third World, according to Vijay Prashad, does not represent a place, but a project.99.Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2008. 

National liberation struggles, guerrilla resistance and counter-insurgent actions in the 1950s and 1960s became increasingly oriented towards influencing people’s thinking, rather than deploying armies. They were implementing the new techniques of political warfare, or, as art theorist and philosopher Stevan Vuković claims in his essay ‘Non Aligned Nomos’, they were establishing the new nomos (order, law).1010.Stevan Vuković, Non-Aligned Nomos, Non-Aligned Modernisms series, Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017. This type of warfare may be combined with violence, economic pressure, subversion and diplomacy, but its chief aspect is the use of words, images and ideas, commonly known as propaganda or political warfare.1111.Vuković, Non-Aligned Nomos, p. iv. Its main goal is that of ‘winning hearts and minds’, rather than conquering territories.

In the Algerian War, the enormous psychological superiority of the rebels efficiently countered the truly enormous material superiority of the French forces. Yet Yacef Saâdi, one of the military commanders of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), wrote in his diary, after Frantz Fanon, that the ‘colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence.’1212.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1963, p. 85. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), the ultimate film on the use of violence and guerrilla tactics in the struggle for national liberation, is a direct implementation of Saâdi’s experiences, whose memoirs, written in prison, were used as the script for the film. (Saâdi was barely literate, and dictated the text to a friend.) In the movie, Saâdi plays a character, Djafar, modelled on his own experiences.

‘As soon as I open my eyes, I see a film’, stated Tom Gotovac, the Zagreb-based protagonist of the New Art Practice movement in 1960s Yugoslavia.1313.This artist statement is used for the title of his monograph: Tomislav Gotovac, As Soon as I Open my Eyes I See a Film, Zagreb: Croatian Film Association, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2003. 

‘In the midst of the reality of the liberation war in Algiers, I walk, sleep and dream of being in Paris, in a cinema, watching a war movie about the liberation struggles’, stated Stevan Labudović, photographer, film-worker and fighter in the National Liberation Army of Algiers (ALN).1414.In Labudović’s photo diaries, presented in the installation Cinema, School and War of Independence, in Milica Tomić, ‘How on Earth?’, Cultural Center of Belgrade, 2022. 

These two disparate statements are brought together by one thing: the thinking of image through the radical breaks between eyes-open and eyes-closed, between dreaming and waking, between living and projecting.

The militant image – the image that mobilizes, encourages, promises, informs, educates, spurs; an impossible image that cannot be seen, unless it’s passed down by a vision; an image dreamed up while walking with eyes shut, just to be awakened in a better world.

What is the position of a militant artist? What is a militant film? What is a camera person with an instrument for producing images in one hand, and a militant instrument – a machine gun – in the other? What are the images that come into being in the alternation between these two instruments?

The installation Cinema, School and War of Independence by Milica Tomić (at the Cultural Center of Belgrade in 2022) investigates the politics and ethics of the militant image. Her rethinking of Labudović’s photo albums and infrastructures of political solidarity is displayed through the medium of zidne novine (wall newspapers), in which Labudović had worked as a young partisan. Yugoslavia’s Filmske Novosti’s propaganda department sent Labudović to Algiers in 1959 as part of a Yugoslav programme of solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements. The autonomous presentations of the National Liberation Army of Algiers (ALN) were important to counter hegemonic images produced by the French colonial regime that depicted occupation forces as keepers of law and order, and the rebels as terrorists. Filmske Novosti, like Labudović himself, was fully aware of the fact that modern warfare is based on a war of images. Organizing a school of film and photography amid the conflict, taking the side of the Algerian independence movement, Filmske Novosti thus enabled the production of news from the field that would not have been available otherwise. As a school, it was mainly political in nature, with a decolonial approach to knowledge, skills, visualization and the use of technology. The school was a materialist embodiment of the principle of necessary, useful knowledge, inviting us to rethink the contemporary professionalist dogma of objective journalism that serves to establish an equidistance between parties in conflict – a hegemonic political horizon of reconciliation, instead of a liberation war for eternal peace.

An image of long duration and long struggle is, at the same time, an image that may be used and consumed excessively, its political meaning fading or becoming the very space of the struggle for and by-means-of the image. In this way, the themes of history, and specifically the emancipatory moments of Yugoslav socialism, became the basis of artistic identities in the post–Yugoslav region – a kind of trend or genre in which history and politics were appropriated for the success of individual authors on the critical art market.

In the above photograph of an action performed by Milica Tomić, Purloined Letter (2014), the artist walks down the steps in the garden of the Museum of Yugoslavia carrying a fragment of the famous photograph of NAM’s leaders, a sort of photo ID of the movement and its establishment during the Belgrade Summit of 1961. Having snatched away this detail, almost stealing it, the artist uses the photographic reproduction of the performance to symbolize the fragmentation of common history under the banner of artistic authorship.

The artist’s body is hidden behind the image, almost completely covered; it is as if the image itself is running away through the forest. It is as if it ‘got legs’, as is said of a stolen object, which is almost literally depicted in this work. Taken from a height, the photo shows a lush canopy of conifers, green cascades of pine branches. The stairs surrounded by deep forest seem to lead nowhere, towards something that we cannot yet see.

The photographic action was recorded in a highly ideological setting, the garden of the former Residency and Memorial Complex of Josip Broz Tito (now the Museum of Yugoslavia), which hosts a significant collection of presidential gifts from countries all around the world, many of which are members of NAM. The Museum of Yugoslavia maintains, conserves and activates its objects and narratives through contemporary art exhibits. It is an inexhaustible resource for contemporary art production, in its restless search for new threads of emancipatory histories. It is a place where ‘archive fever’ is always actual, highly intense, and often combined with left melancholy.

In the photo installation Fabrics of Socialism by Vesna Pavlović (2013) one encounters the very apparatus of the socialist archive, its archival hardware, architecture and infrastructure. In photographing the archival spaces of the Museum of Yugoslavia and Filmske Novosti, Pavlović seeks not to discover ‘lost images’, but rather to show their material conditions of image preservation and indexing. In pre-digital times, the shared experience of a photograph was firmly grounded in photographic objecthood, in the bulky technologies of image-making and reproduction. Objectifying the archive itself as a container of images of liberation wars and horizons of peace, Pavlović captures a certain unsettling quality of the image that, in terms of the event, is cold and vacant. The images contained in all these metal caskets evoke the artist’s claim that ‘the very photographs remind us that memory is a constructed phenomenon.’1515.Jelena Vesić, interview with Vesna Pavlović, April, 2024. These photographs are themselves archives of their time – their preservation, their material resilience to time’s ravages.

Pavlović remains faithful to her research on photographic materiality and the way that images are staged and presented to their viewers, offering profound insights into the ideological apparatuses and visual philosophy of the analogue photographic image. Her scenes of absence evoke the alienating presence of something that cannot be easily defined: emptied of life and the everyday, the materialities of architectures and infrastructures are communicated as pure form, apparently ‘clean’ and frozen in time and space. Still, each image insists on a certain event, its before and after; it says, ‘I stand for a larger scenario.’

Works by Pavlović and Tomić can be read as reflections on the constellations of history and property within the political economy of the archival image in contemporary art. In an era of ever-expanding historical revisionisms and politics-without-truth, the relentless appropriation, packaging, repackaging and named-artist branding of common heritage as artistic research becomes private property on the market of attention.

Who profits from history, archives and legacy?

What are the ethics and politics of the artistic appropriation of historical content?

Who has the right to these images?