LECTURE
15/02/2020 AT 19.00
GALLERY NOVA, TESLINA 7, ZAGREB

In her lecture, Belgrade curator Jelena Vesić focused on the question "Is it possible to express solidarity in time outside of mere commemoration?", Reflecting on the relationship between time and solidarity. The project of the solidarity of the Yugoslav people with the people of Latin America that Darinka Pop-Mitić and myself researched and made public over the past years, was part of the Tribune Program of the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade. In the words of its editor, Milo Petrović,the tribune “offered a site of free-minded public speech, intellectual debate,and social activism.” Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, the Tribune presented several conferences and events: the Week of Spain in 1976, coinciding with the end of Franco’s dictatorship; the Week of Latin America in 1977,examining the anti-colonial struggle of various militant guerrilla movements inthe era of corporate neocolonialism. The first “women’s questions” outside theWestern context were posed during the conference Drug-ca žena (Comradess Women) in 1978; and an event dedicated to militantrevolutionary Chilean cinema—the SecondWeek of Latin America—was held atthe beginning of the 1980s. New movements in anti-psychiatry were discussed in 1983, while political discussions over 1984 were dedicated to the critique ofinternal Yugoslav politics that would slowly lead to the dissolution of thefederation.

The event of solidarity of Yugoslav people with the people of Latin America was one crest of the wave of the world’s solidarity with Chile,after the fall of the government of Salvador Allende and the beginning ofAugusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The decade of the 1970s was the era of theworst military dictatorships in Latin American countries—the time of the fallof the first democratically elected Marxist president in Latin America(Allende) in which the generals of Argentina were waging the infamous Guerra Sucia (Dirty War) against its population, exterminating politicalenemies by committing such acts as throwing people out of airplanes. This wasthe time when many political refugees fled to Europe and, along with assistancein the wider sense of social care and security, within certain circles alsoreceived solidary help in promoting, and agitating for, their political cause. 

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