Marko Stamenkovic

Senior Visiting Fellow in the cluster "Knowledge transfer and concepts of Europe"

Decolonial Knowledge Transfer and the Re-making of “Europe”: Curatorial Humanities, Non-Aligned Legacy, and Transregional Epistemic Justice in Central/Eastern Europe

“We work for tomorrow” is the motto of the University of Graz. “Everything Was Better Tomorrow” is the title of an exhibition at the Graz Museum exploring life in the city during the 1970s. Taken together, these two formulations suggest a question: what if tomorrow could be reimagined through ways of knowing and thinking that have been neglected, marginalised, or consigned to the past? What if these “histories of tomorrow” could change and transform the way Europe is understood and represented now? Could historical memories — personal and collective — help us reconsider the futures we have inherited, glorious and traumatic at the same time, rather than simply reproduce them? 

Such questions matter, for instance, for the permanent exhibition “Why?” at the History Museum of Graz, where the troublesome “fascination with and cohesive power of the National Socialist regime” one hundred years ago in Styria serve as a critical platform for confronting the Nazi regime’s fabrication of a “people’s community” – a formula invented not only to collectivise the like-minded, but also to classify and exclude those who did not fit the norm. Such questions also matter for the idea of contemporary Europe itself, especially if Europe is not to be treated as a settled or fixed geopolitical entity, or as a self-sufficient intellectual tradition, but as something continually produced, sometimes threatened and destroyed, and then reproduced again – through knowledge and exchange, as well as through practices of open exclusion (and often ambiguous inclusion). But what might change if Europe learned to understand itself from perspectives it has historically treated as peripheral to its own intellectual history – if it had to learn about itself from somewhere else? And what role might cultural centres, educational institutions, and exhibition programmes play in making such a reorientation possible?

Graz offers a situated context from which to explore these questions. Its cultural and intellectual landscape invites reflection on the historical relationships between Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, colonial modernity, and the wider world: Walter Langhammer’s experience in independent India, as well as Susanne Wenger’s experience in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria are but two artistic examples of what some scholars call “practical internationalism”. One possible wider direction, in this regard, would be to compare Austria’s policy of neutrality, developed in the context of Bruno Kreisky’s diplomatic career and later foreign policy, with socialist Yugoslavia’s independent foreign policy and its role in the Non-Aligned Movement under Josip Broz Tito. Although these were distinct political projects, their relationship to the dominant Cold War blocs raises questions about how smaller European states and societies negotiated international power and imagined alternatives to established geopolitical divisions. A sustained comparison of Austrian neutrality and Yugoslav Non-Alignment, however, belongs to a future stage of research.

The present project focuses on a related but more specific question: What happens to the idea of Europe when forms of knowledge, solidarity, and cultural production historically marginalised within its dominant institutions are reconsidered from elsewhere – from transregional and South–South perspectives? To approach this question, three most distinctive frameworks are brought together: decolonial theory, curatorial humanities, and the contested legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement – the latter being neither simply a historical object nor an abstract ideal, but an ongoing epistemic proposition for reimagining cultural infrastructures through practices of knowledge circulation and solidarity. Its continuing relevance is explored through the curatorial practices in which internationalist principles may become material — and may also encounter limits or contradictions.

The history and collections of the Museum of African Art in Belgrade (founded around the collection assembled by Veda and Dr Zdravko Pecar), together with its ongoing exhibition practices, publications, and related educational programmes, offer an important setting in which to investigate the cultural dimensions of Yugoslav Non-Alignment. This phenomenon has not been an unexplored area of scholarly inquiry. Nonetheless, what makes it relevant today is the potential of situated, transregional knowledge transfer to offer a counter-model to Eurocentric knowledge production, as well as the opportunity to engage with the complex histories of colonial acquisition and the renewed demands for the restitution of artefacts held in European collections. 

If contributing to epistemic justice is a prerequisite for addressing Europe’s current and ongoing epistemic crises, this project may help rethink Europe otherwise. In this sense, the question of who gets to make Europe is also a question of how Europe might learn to become otherwise — or unlearn itself in order to be born anew – for the better, non-fascist tomorrows.

Dr. Marko Stamenkovic (1977, Yugoslavia) is a scholar of modern and contemporary visual culture, writer and lecturer. Trained in art history at the University of Belgrade, he holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ghent University (2014), and is affiliated with ZETA Contemporary Art Center in Tirana. What keeps him active in the study of global image-worlds (where past and present visual storytelling mediate social and political histories, personal and group identities, and human/non-human cultural exchange) is not the false promise of ultimate knowledge but the possibility of remaining at the margins, carrying uneasy questions without forcing them to produce answers.