Dimensions of Europe Lunch Lecture by Marko Stamenkovic

We kindly invite you to join the lunch lecture Who Gets to Make Europe Today? Unruly Epistemologies, Curatorial Humanities and the Non-Aligned Legacy by Visiting Fellow Marko Stamenkovic on 13 January starting at 12:00 at Seminar room 67.01 (Elisabethstraße 27/ground floor). 

In the time of AI-driven psycho-politics, who has the authority to produce or reproduce anything—including Europe as an idea—and with what consequences? How is “Europe” constructed through knowledge and its deviations alike, and what changes when we look at Europe through non-European forms of knowledge transfer? What if what our dear continent understands itself to be was already constituted through forms of exchange it subsequently marginalized and demonized, or deliberately neglected and forgot? 

 Approaching Europe not as a fixed geographical entity but as an unstable concept produced through multidimensional processes of knowledge transfer, this research explores how institutions—and those positioned outside or against their frameworks—participate in producing ideas of Europe by deciding what kinds of knowledge, histories and forms of cultural experience become visible, valuable and legitimate. Focusing on Central and Eastern Europe and the Museum of African Art in Belgrade, the talk revisits the Yugoslav legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement as an alternative history of transcontinental knowledge exchange. Rather than treating decolonization simply as the inclusion of previously marginalized cultures, it asks what Europe might become when South-South solidarities, non-hegemonic epistemologies and other forms of knowledge transfer are taken seriously as constitutive of its history. More specifically, the research proposes curatorial humanities as a way of rethinking educational and exhibition practices: not only as forms of representation, but as active sites where Europe is continually made, contested and re-imagined otherwise.