Southward and Otherwise
This project comes out of a conversation between Mohaiemen and rPajović on the relative absence of Non-Aligned Movement co-founder, and former President of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, from the three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017, dir: Mohaiemen) Through a series of conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki, the shadow play of Pajović’s text re-integrates the Yugoslav bloc into Two Meetings and a Funeral. While Pajović’s text concludes with a hopeful view of the potential of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mohaiemen’s images and superimposed quote from Tito express an ironic doubling back. Indira Gandhi’s Indian coalition of 1971, while maneuvering for Bangladesh independence from Pakistan, encountered Tito’s confident comment that such problems of “tribalism” were only happening in Asia. Yugoslavia had solved the “Balkan problem”– spoken confidently twenty years before Tito’s nation would split apart during the Yugoslav Wars. The geopolitical struggles that Tito fails to see in 1971 are harbingers for the blind spots that would cause Non-Alignment’s collapse.
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