‘Naming the Money’ has become Himid’s signature installation, consisting of 100 colourfully painted figures interacting with each other across a large gallery space accompanied by a soundscape. It speaks to the history of Transatlantic Slavery and to modern modes of labour, which have in common the destruction of identities through the movement across geographies. Scraps of text on accounting paper on the backs of each figure tell poetically the journey of these people through the change in their names when in the new place. The figures act as a guerrilla memorialisation of multiple African diasporic figures who have been forgotten by history. Through the theoretical writings of Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Stuart Hall, Dionne Brand, Hershini Bhana Young, Saidiya Hartman and Giorgio Agamben the chapter explicated the ways in which Himid uses her installation to comment on historical and contemporary trauma and those who are lost and displaced, then and now.
Dionne Brand and Alanis Obomsawin: polyphony in the poetics of resistance
