10/20/2026
Join us at Public Trust for Rethinking our Political Inheritances, a conversation on Wednesday, October 21, 2026 from 5-6:30pm about listening at the edges of history and the political resonances of non-alignment. This event will feature filmmaker Mila Turajlić and scholar Kristen Ghodsee in conversation, and has been organized in conjunction with A General Assembly, an archival installation on display at Public Trust through December 1, 2026. Presented in partnership with the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, and the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Non-alignment is often misremembered as neutrality, a way of staying out of the Cold War. For the countries that gathered in Belgrade in 1961, it meant the opposite. It was a third position, taken against colonialism, apartheid, and bloc politics, in support of the right of peoples to decide their own futures. As part of A General Assembly, historian and ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee and filmmaker Mila Turajlić revisit this largely forgotten chapter of the twentieth century by looking at particular people rather than abstract positions. Working across ethnography, oral history and personal archives, they have both spent years with the lives of people who worked in the space the Cold War said didn't exist.
This conversation follows that path through three lives. Elena Lagadinova, a teenage partisan in Bulgaria, went on to build alliances between women in the socialist East and the Global South. Stevan Labudović, Tito's cameraman, filmed the Algerian revolution and the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement. Elaine Mokhtefi, a New Yorker, joined the Algerian struggle and later chose exile over betraying a colleague. Each believed in a larger project. Each also kept a sense of personal judgment within it, and each outlived the era that shaped them, seeing the worlds that gave their work meaning disappear. Kristen Ghodsee and Mila Turajlić sought them out decades later, at the edges of history and listened to what they wanted to pass on. They will discuss what these lives can tell us now, what these networks of solidarity achieved, why they were written out of Cold War histories, and what they might offer a present in which global cooperation feels increasingly fragile.
Rethinking our Political Inheritances is part of the 2026-2027 series HEAR (HERE), organized by the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE) at the University of Pennsylvania. The series comprises a year of public programming that traces south-south collaborations and non-aligned solidarities through sonic, visual, and haptic archives.
Join us at Public Trust and other partner sites across Philadelphia including the Barnes Foundation and the ICA as we dialogue with filmmakers, poets, theorists, and artists whose shared attention to how archives sound and resound in the present and can inspire us to think the world anew.
Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/rethinking-our-political-inheritances
Image: Stevan Labudovic, Screenshot from outtakes of material filmed for Filmske Novosti during President TIto's tour of Africa, 1961. Courtesy of Filmske Novosti.
