876002

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MSS0010.1177/1750698019876002Memory StudiesTello

Article

Memory Studies

Counter-memory and and–and:

2022, Vol. 15(2) 390­–401
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1750698019876002
https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019876002
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Verónica Tello
University of New South Wales, Sydney

Abstract
This essay traces a critical genealogy of counter-memory – spanning critical theory, film and contemporary
art – bound to what Rosi Braidotti terms nomadic subjectivity. Engaging with the work of feminist and
postcolonial theorists and artists, this essay charts the import of nomadic subjectivity as a method for staying
with the many times and histories of global contemporaneity. It aims to move beyond thinking of counter-
memory as simply a means to maintain or register erased and/or contested histories, or as a dialectical
mnemonic system. It charts an alternative concept of counter-memory, one that is post-dialectical, not
bound to the formulas of either/or, us/them or self/other, but which is instead committed to the endless
accumulation and proximities of things – the and–and.

Keywords
Black Audio Film Collective, montage, nomadic subjectivity, migration, counter-memory, global
contemporaneity, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, Michel Foucault, Rosi Braidotti, Sydney Biennale, Transfield

What is counter-memory? In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes (1980: 91) mobilises the term, albeit
briefly, in order to evoke the amnesic qualities of photographs. That is, their capacity to counter
memory – the act of remembrance. Barthes’ engagement with the concept of counter-memory
comes after Michel Foucault (1971), for whom it also connoted the process of being contra/coun-
ter-memory, as well as contra/counter-history – but not so much vis-à-vis amnesia, as much as the
desire to contest the hegemony of monolithic, monumental memory sites and historiography.
Writing after 1968, a youngish and radicalised Foucault (1971) conceptualised counter-memory, or
contre-mémoire, in an attempt to forge a ‘totally different form of time’ (p. 385) than that which
was enabled by positivist, teleological models of history while simultaneously registering and
maintaining otherwise scratched over and/or forgotten records of resistance and oppression.
Counter-memory is a concept (for re-thinking time) and agent of political subjectification that
refuses the nationalist-normativity of remembrance – as tied up as it is with monuments and ‘offi-
cial’, canonised histories – while also attempting to forge temporalities attuned to the social

Corresponding author:
Verónica Tello, University of New South Wales, P.O. Box 259, Paddington, NSW 2021, Australia.
Email: v.tello@unsw.edu.au
Tello 391

movements and struggles of the vanquished (in this latter sense, counter-memory can also be read
as a method).
The discourse on counter-memory has been advanced by multiple scholars, including Barthes,
but it is the Foucauldian interpretation of this term that has resonated across generations – and
across disciplines. In 1975, for example, the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma staged a con-
versation with Foucault on the nexus of counter-memory and class struggle – analysing films such
as El Coraje del Pueblo (Courage of the People, 1971). El Coraje is a re-enactment of a 1967
state-military led attack on striking tin miners and their families in Bolivia. The film involves wit-
nesses and survivors of the attack as participants in the re-enactment. For Cahiers du Cinéma, El
Coraje represents an experimental history, a counter-memory, which allows the temporalities of
the miners’ resistance and struggles to exceed the state’s biopolitical management of life (and
death) and history. In his influential book Narrative as Counter-Memory, comparative literature
theorist Reiko Tachibana (1998) discusses the minor narratives – from experimental writers such
as Mishima Yukio and Christa Wolf – that have disrupted ‘officially sanctioned’ war narratives and
national mythologies in Japan and Germany after 1945. In the writings of art historian TJ Demos
(2012: n.p.), counter-memory ‘designates a practice of memory formation that is social and politi-
cal, one that runs counter to the official histories of governments, mainstream mass media, and the
society of the spectacle’. It appears in the work of multiple documentary makers and artists grap-
pling with, and interrogating, concepts of truth and fiction for the purposes re-defining epistemol-
ogy, collective memory and social struggle. For Demos (2012: n.p.), counter-memory involves ‘a
collective practice of relearning–of forgotten, suppressed, and excluded histories, which then
becomes an act of political subjectification’. As this brief genealogy makes clear, counter-memory
is often, if not always, read as a conceptual tool, and indeed method, to mobilise the memories and
struggles of the vanquished in the face of abject violence and dispossession. It is most often char-
acterised as grappling with two temporalities, that which has been diminished or erased and that
which is monumental. By mediating the tensions of these temporalities, it is seen to energise social
movements – counter-memory is cast as a critical catalyst of social justice.
While I am deeply sympathetic to such a reading of counter-memory, I am nonetheless wanting
counter-memory to be something more than just a ‘counter’ to the hegemony and normativity of
the state or spectacle, or a conflict of the histories of the vanquished and the victors. In other words,
I want it to be more than a dialectical concept, and teleological. As I will argue in this essay,
counter-memory can be thought and structured through a formula other than either/or or us/them
and that formula is the and–and.1 This is a formula that sustains not just one history over another
(vanquished/victors), not even just one history with another, but rather multiple histories being held
together, or networked – not without tension or difference, just not dialectical.
The and–and does not forego a commitment to memories of the vanquished. But it rejects any
mode of dialectics that lends itself to the very binaries that sustain social, economic and political
violence. As a product of the and–and formula, counter-memory registers histories of the van-
quished and positions them among multiple other analogous and/or conflicting historical fragments.
It is invested in the act of accumulation. It is inherently attuned to and wanting heterogeneity.
Why this model of counter-memory? I want to posit that the emergence of this mode of counter-
memory has something to do with living in global contemporaneity. As discussed further below,
this era is marked by the capacity to be attuned to all kinds of heterogenous materialities/immate-
rialities – time zones, histories, geographies and subjects. It is attuned to excess; irreducible too-
muchness. In this context, counter-memory, structured through the and–and, asks subjects to
become embedded in a mass and mess of things and to navigate this matter and its full heterogene-
ity as a means to constitute the contemporary – contemporary subjectivity, inter-subjectivity and
memory.
392 Memory Studies 15(2)

As an aesthetic structured by the and–and, counter-memory appears to be highly dependent on

one particular artistic strategy: montage (and this ties back to the aesthetics of heterogeneity men-
tioned above). Montage as a mnemonic form – and method – is a way of interconnecting disparate,
heterogenous things. Montage operates through desire, yearning to connect to another thing,
always, even if the connection is weak or fraught. Its power and potential, however, is that –
through its relentless need to connect, resonate with or disrupt things – it can recalibrate existing
ways of seeing, ways of relating or experiencing time/space.
As I will discuss below, montage is central to the non-dialectical mode of counter-memory
which is the focus of this essay. I animate the nexus of montage and counter-memory through ana-
lysing two works, the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986) and Isaac Julien’s
Ten Thousand Waves (2010), and the institutions through which such works obtain meaning and
capacity to circualte: Transfied, academia and the univiersity. In such analyses, there emerges an
important genealogy of counter-memory, one which is bound to being in motion, and more specifi-
cally, what Braidotti (2011) terms nomadic subjectivity. The nomadic subject is constructed
through its partiality, always seeking to be shaped through another encounter, another history,
another subject – the and–and. Such a subjectivity and mode of being enables a means to be criti-
cally present with the often-incommensurable temporalities, histories and spaces of global
contemporanetiy.

Non-dialectical counter-memory in Foucault

While mostly absent in existing discourse on counter-memory, for Foucault, counter-memory is
certainly non-dialectical. As Rosi Braidotti (2008) argues, after 1968, Foucault, like Deleuze and
Guattari, worked to produce political concepts that circumvented Hegelian dialectics. Refusing the
politics of negation – including forms of subjectification contingent on the division of self and
other, and teleology – Foucault instead attempted to articulate a subjectivity that was immanent – a
part of, and networked with, multiple beings and things of the world; a form of subjectivity that
recognised that power is not simply oppositional – here or elsewhere – but rather everywhere; it
appears across multiple subjects and institutions in contradictory ways (Braidotti, 2008, 2018).
The import of such a fluid, fractured form of subjectivity to counter-memory is evident in
Foucault’s (1971) essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy and History’. He maps counter-memory in relation
to a subject imminent with, and unfolding, with time. As Foucault (1971) states, the ‘true historical
sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of refer-
ence’ (p. 386). Counter-memory pulls us into the depths of memory without an anchor, without a
specific location. He continues,

The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit
itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to
which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us.
(Foucault, 1971: 386–387)

Counter-memory, guided by genealogy, mobilises a critically rootless subject, one that is at once
grounded in a politics of location (see more on this below) yet refusing the stasis of origin narra-
tives and essentialism. Counter-memory constructs a subject that is in constant flux. Such a fluid,
indeed nomadic, subject is shaped not by literal movement (as is the case with migrants) or is it
antithetical to bearing a literal connection to a singular place (as is the case for first nations people);
rather, such a subject is fluid/nomadic because of its contestation of traditional conceptual bounda-
ries that seek to generate deterritorialised modes of being that are able cut across disparate spaces/
Tello 393

places and assemble a constellation of subjectivities to disrupt binaries, dualisms, universalisms

and institute total difference (Braidotti, 2011; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

Counter-memory + nomadic subjectivity

As Braidotti (2002) has argued, the nomadic subject is akin to counter-memory. It resists assimila-
tion and homologation into normative modes of being and performing the self. It constructs a sense
of self via memories and histories that go against the grain and which nurture subjugated knowl-
edge. Yet, while going against the grain, it is not dialectical. It is relational. It recognises that sub-
jectivity is inscribed by multiple codes – sex, gender and race – which vary within and between
each subject – often bearing contradictory locations. A (politics of) location is not simply where
one has come from or how one articulates themselves. Rather, a location is constructed though
one’s embodied material relations with others. It refuses the logic of universalism and insists on
difference while enabling the interconnectivity of distinct subjects and communities – bearing
responsibility for oneself. Nomadic subjectivity is akin to counter-memory to the extent that it is
grounded on a refusal of concepts of self that erode the possibility of experimental, anti-teleologi-
cal futures.

Alter-genealogy of counter-memory: Mercer, diasporic aesthetics

and nomadic subjectivity
As noted above, nomadic subjectivity is not correlative to literal modes of migration, but rather the
capacity to refuse static, essentialist modes of being. Yet, I am now paradoxically going to focus on
the manifestation of counter-memory in diasporic aesthetics, which I will broadly define here as art
that attends to and invokes the affect and experience of migration.
A key moment in the genealogy of counter-memory manifests in Kobena Mercer’s (1994) dis-
course on diasporic aesthetics, informed by the writings of Foucault, and emerging at a moment in
time when Black cultural theorists, including Stuart Hall, were engaging with feminist and queer
discourses to move away from essentialist modes of identity politics. Mercer’s discourse on coun-
ter-memory is most vivid in his writings on the Black Audio Film Collective and the Sankofa Film
and Video Collective – the latter included a young Isaac Julien. While I will analyse Julien’s con-
temporary artwork Ten Thousand Waves below, for now I will only focus on the Black Audio Film
Collective’s Handsworth Songs and Mercer’s discourse. As it will become clear, this work repre-
sents an important instance as to when counter-memory is no longer viably conceived as a dialecti-
cal politic and concept, and thus instead pursues the structure of the and–and, attuned to nomadic
subjectivity.
Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs emerged out of a wave of social unrest and
violence sparked by racial tensions and high unemployment in Birmingham in the mid 1980s.
More specifically, the work traces the history of racial tensions between Asian and Caribbean
migrants, the British police and the National Front, a neo-fascist group, during Thatcher’s Britain.
As Mercer (1994: 60) argues, through non-linear montage, Handsworth Songs seeks to develop a
deep, archaeological account of the riots – refuting claims in the media at the time that the riots
emerged out of a vacuum. The film traces a long history of racial tensions in Birmingham, and
Britain, by sieving through archives of empire and migration – interconnecting these histories with
global capital more broadly.
For example, in one sequence of the film, images of the Birmingham riots from 1977 are juxta-
posed with those of 1985 and marches by the National Front, showing the long duration of these
events. They are interconnected with archival footage of British workers on May Day in the 1940s;
394 Memory Studies 15(2)

footage and songs of chain factory workers in the early twentieth century; archival new footage
from the 1950s reporting on how a traditionally British working-class area in midlands England,
and its British ways of life, is being degraded by the emergence of new migrant workers. An
excerpt of an interview with Margaret Thatcher from the 1980s commenting on the arrival of new
migrants, and to her mind the warranted fear felt by the British public at the time, is juxtaposed
with police brutality against Caribbean diasporic youth in the United Kingdom.
Following Mercer, this kind of counter-memory offers a highly intelligent reading of a specific
historical event, the Birmingham 1985 riots, while simultaneously leaving room for the event to be
in flux. In other words, the event, in Handsworth Songs, is itself nomadic. It is structured through
the and–and formula. It moves through various time zones and places to invoke disparate histories
and voices that rupture the homogeneity of English identity and essentialist readings of Black com-
munity. It constructs, in Mercer’s (1994) words, ‘chains or association’ between identities rather
than insisting on ‘divisive binary oppositions’ (p. 61). The idea of constructing chains of associa-
tion is invoked by the film itself, through its playful use of the footage of the chain factory workers
(described above), which invokes the metaphor of chains as the Black Audio Film Collective layer
image upon image, history upon history. To my mind, Handsworth Songs is a clear precedent for
not only how counter-memory is attuned to critical rootlessness in flux but bearing the responsibil-
ity of a politics of location. It acknowledges that any one subject is shaped by various and some-
times contradictory axes of power – class, race, ethnicity and sexuality – rather than a fixed identity
and that counter-memory can hold together various incongruous histories and historical subjects
without dialectics and binary thinking. Here, counter-memory – structured through the and–and –
asks subjects to become embedded in a mass and mess of times, signifying heterogenous histories
and people. It is structured via montage; the accumulation of heterogenous things.

Counter-memory + contemporaneity
What is counter-memory after Mercer, after Handsworth, and after the politics of diaspora and
xenophobia in Thatcher’s Britain? What is counter-memory today, vis-à-vis global contemporane-
ity? I want to posit that today, marked by all kinds of economic, cultural and politics flows, coun-
ter-memory appears radically porous: it is not so much that it forgoes boundaries, borders or
tensions, but rather that it suggests that any struggle for historical consciousness might play out, if
it can play out at all, through an embeddedness in and willingness to work through the profound
heterogeneity of a world wherein the source of power and conflict is constantly moving, shifting
and reappearing in the most unexpected of forms (Tello, 2016: 10).
How to define our era, the era of global contemporaneity? To be contemporary, or to be con
tempus, that is to be with time and of one’s time, is more than just a vague state of ‘presentness’
(Smith, 2009: 5–6). It refutes a modernist conception of time – a time that seamlessly continues
from the modern to globalisation in the image of a coherent, perfectly curated future (telos).
Contemporaneity opts for and is acclimatised to states of ‘difference’, ‘multifariousness’ and
‘incommensurability’ (Terry Smith’s terms; Smith, 2009: 197–198). This manifests itself in modes
of being attuned to, and able to live with, ‘[m]ultiple yet incommensurable temporalities . . . and
[correlative] conceptions of historical development [which] move in multifarious directions’
(Smith, 2009: 197–198). It is defined by multiple and conflicting ways of being in time, at the same
time as others, as a means to rupture any singular concept of time, or future.
Yet, contemporaneity is not just constituted by experimental thinking on time/s. As Osborne
(2013: 22) reminds us, the etymology of the term ‘contemporary’ denotes ‘living, existing, or
occurring together’ in time. Historically, within modernity, social inter-relations have predomi-
nantly been imagined vis-à-vis the boundaries of the nation – of communities bound together by a
Tello 395

deep if not also false sense of ‘horizontal comradeship’ as articulated by Benedict Anderson (1983)
in Imagined Communities. In global contemporaneity, the idea of ‘living together’ can no longer
be convincingly delimited (as it once was) to the material and conceptual borders of the nation-
state. Decolonial temporalities have eroded its hegemony, and post- and trans-national imagina-
tions shape social inter-relations within today’s geopolitically complex world. Contemporaneity, as
Osborne (2013: 27) argues, is constituted by the conjunction of multiple social subjects and diverse
social experiences: the uneven co-presence of the diasporic, the settler-colonialist, the indigenous
and the stateless (for example). The many and diverging experiences of individuals across hetero-
geneous communities structure the heterogeneity of contemporaneity.
At the same time, global contemporaneity is not simply a field of difference. If we think it from
a slightly different vantage point than the ones offered by Smith and Osborne, global contempora-
neity is driven by critiques of who has the right to the means of production, whose histories matter
and who has a right to visuality – to look and not just be looked at (Mirzoeff, 2011). As a process
of de-linking from modern narratives and systems, it is consonant with multiple decolonial move-
ments working through the politics of epistemology (Miner, 2018), of how knowledge is made,
from whose perspective it is produced, and how it serves the West, in order to construct options for
knowing and being in the world. It values historically erased and systemically marginalised knowl-
edge forms and knowledge makers as constituents of the past and futures that shape our concept of
what is possible. It does not seek to eliminate the West, only its totalizing hegemony (Tello, 2018b).
With this mind, I would like to offer some speculations: if counter-memory is to be contempo-
rary, it will form with the multiple, sometimes diverging sometimes overlapping subjectivities,
energies and temporalities of the global Norths and Souths, acknowledging the complex and struc-
tural economic challenges this poses to co-presence and a shared sense of history. Contemporary
counter-memory would refuse the West/North’s hegemony and relentless attempts to make mani-
fest its zombie teleological dreams. Contemporary counter-memory would animate the practical
and antagonistic capacities of aesthetics to organise different ways of being and being together in
the current period of both neoliberal hyper-individualism and intensified border politics/
transnationalism.
We live in border zones of difference. We live in increasing proximity. Counter-memory (as
method for navigating time) reconceptualises the event as ever expansive, not delimited by a par-
ticular era, geography or theme: it extends into multiple directions. It is somewhat borderless.
Counter-memory offers a means to be with multiple temporalities for the sake of reflecting on
contemporaneity’s composition and taking seriously the demands of being ‘with’ multiple times,
conjuring a feeling even that there is a mass of times. Perhaps too many times. An excess.
Counter-memory foregoes negative dialectics. It is not in sync with thinking of history as per-
petual aftermath. It acknowledges ongoing accumulation of violence, but charts energies of resist-
ance and affirmation of life at the same time.
Counter-memory’s allegiance is to an aesthetic of rootlessness or nomadism. Here, identities
and histories are not fixed or static. They are better thought, through the process of affective juxta-
positions – montage – as processual, moving through complex and diverse networks. Counter-
memory is attuned to being with other disjunctive subjects in time.

Ten Thousand Waves

I want to further expand and test this concept of counter-memory by analysing a contemporary
artwork – Ten Thousand Waves (2010) – by Isaac Julien. During the mid 1980s, Julien was a mem-
ber of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, which emerged at the same time and under similar
conditions as the Black Audio Film Collective. Throughout his career, Julien has developed a range
396 Memory Studies 15(2)

of, often highly personal, projects on the Caribbean diaspora in the United Kingdom and North
America and projects which engage with the aesthetics and politics of Afro-Futurism.
However, over the past 10 years, through works such as Ten Thousand Waves, Julien’s work has
increasingly departed from his focus on the Caribbean diaspora and towards contemporary, global
migratory flows. Ten Thousand Waves is a counter-memorialisation of the 2004 Morecambe Bay
tragedy, where 21 Chinese cockle-pickers, asylum seekers and illegal migrants from China drowned
in the north-west of England. Like many Chinese asylum seekers and refugees, the cockle-pickers
arrived in the United Kingdom to deeply precarious conditions. Unable to return home and unwill-
ing to apply for asylum, many Chinese nationals prefer to work ‘illegally’, outside governmental
bureaucracy. The illegal and near-invisible status of these Chinese nationals makes them vulnera-
ble to the demands of gang-masters (Glover, 2014). They are subjected to abusive methods – denial
of wages, unhygienic inhabitation and sexual abuse and violence – and forced to work in areas in
which they have no experience, with no safeguards and for little to no pay – most of the cockle-
pickers were displaced farmers and two were fishermen. As invoked by the audio track in Ten
Thousand Waves, ‘We know how they died: starved, raped, dehydrated, drowned, suffocated,
homesick, heartsick, worked to death’ (Ping, 2014: 79).
Seeking to construct a counter-memory for if not a contested history then contested subjects,
their very existence contested, Waves constructs a complex temporal web through which to engage
with the Morecambe Bay drownings of the cockle-pickers. It shows aerial night footage as emer-
gency crews search for the cockle-pickers and portraits of the cockle-portraits held by family and
friends. These images are interwoven with referents of ancient Chinese fables, archival footage of
Red Guards in Tiananmen Square and rallies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a re-enact-
ment of the Chinese films such as The Goddess (1934), footage of Morecambe Bay and documen-
tary videos of China’s contemporary metropolises and economic centres.
Waves’ radically ‘kaleidoscopic’ (Mulvey, 2014: 202) approach to time and space has been
viewed by such critics such Joseph Livesay (2014) as providing a synoptic narrative of China’s
emergence as a global economic force and the consequences of this trajectory. But I prefer to view
it as a disorientating flow that constructs a cartography of Chinese communism, global capital,
unauthorised migration, migrant labour and dark economies. It cuts across the divisions of distinct
geographies and images and constructs a chronotope of global contemporaneity (Mignolo, 2014).
Waves does not just represent ‘the’ or ‘an’ event – Morecambe Bay (Tello, 2016: 163). It inter-
polates the viewer and situates them in a position of being ‘in’ and ‘with’ the unfolding of multiple
conflicting and heterochronous times and across various spaces. I will only draw your attention to
a few of the sequences of Waves through which such an affect takes place. Scenes from iconic 1934
film The Goddess (which in the 1930s was contemporary slang for ‘prostitute’) are re-enacted in
Waves; its protagonist, the nameless, desperate sex worker appears and reappears throughout. In
the space-time-travel machine of Ten Thousand Waves, the Goddess journeys from the streets of
revolutionary China to the glistening high-rises of contemporary Hong Kong and Pudong where,
like other parts of the country, a thriving, unregulated sex and service industry exists, creating an
underclass of internally displaced women sex workers (Otis, 2011). In another sequence, thir-
teenth-century fishermen are shown trekking through the rugged, mountainous landscapes of the
Fujian province, which has long been a point of trade (including for British opium) and where
today a market exists for people smugglers. It is from Fujian that the cockle-pickers who drowned
at Morecambe Bay left for the United Kingdom. Images of China’s vast highways and corridors,
which enable both legal and ‘illegal’ traffic and interconnectivity, intermingle with images of the
desolate landscapes of Morecambe Bay where the Chinese cockle-pickers drowned. Julien’s
method of constructing complex image-assemblages allows the spectator to be with the multiplic-
ity of events and antinomies that constitute our era. In many instances, events intermingle and
Tello 397

eventually overlap and fold into each other, so that it appears that the ‘past is not yet passed’ (I
borrow this term from Lionis (2014)). This kind of counter-memory works through processes of
accumulation; it is hoarder-like.

Hoarder montage
In Waves, a particular mode of montaging is developed – hoarder montage – accumulating images
through the logic of the and–and. Unable to let go, hoarder montage keeps gathering articles and
fragments, layer upon layer. In the mess that is hoarding, things get squeezed together. This is why
in Waves, the nameless sex worker (from The Goddess) is pushed closer to contemporary sex work-
ers in Pudong and Hong Kong. Or why the thirteenth-century fishermen from Fujian, lost in the
forest, come to stand in for the ghosted asylum seekers who drowned at Morecambe Bay. Or why
the ever-extending highways in China are placed in proximity to the engulfing ocean in Morecambe
Bay. But even as these image-fragments collide, their distinctiveness, and the narratives and histo-
ries they maintain, is not lost. Each article or fragment has a distinct meaning and value to the
hoarder – each fragment is collected because of its essence to memory and the future. This kind of
montage requires a willingness to work through and be embedded in the mess, in the mess of the
hoarder’s storage house. It elicits a relationship between the self, fragments and history that is
deeply ambiguous, structured by the discontinuity of knowledge and memory and must be open to
flux and transition. The method of hoarder montage elicits, in other words, a non-dialectical mode
of counter-memory that ask us, Waves’ spectators, to engage with time/history/others from an
immanent position, of being here–now with others, materially and immaterially connected.

Politics of location
A work like Waves constructs a nomadic subject – traversing multiple zones and spaces – yet it
begs the questions, at what point do we stop being free floating subjects across histories and space?
What politics of location is at play in Waves? As a viewer of Waves, what is my politics of location?
I could say that I approach Waves as a migrant, living in Australia (as a settler-colonialist who
benefits from the systemic dispossession of indigenous people). I left Chile in 1987, as a child, at
the precise moment the Pope was arriving in Chile, greeted by Pinochet. I am a migrant from the
global south, but my politics of location is bound to other axes of power – across gender, race and
sexuality; thus, me telling you that I am a migrant does not really allow me to address the location/s
I find myself in when engaging with Ten Thousand. I would rather tell you that Julien’s Waves
implicates me, as both witnesses and participant of global capital and global contemporaneity.
Within Waves, I am witness, for example, to counter-memories of those who migrate through the
underbelly of global transport infrastructures, on lorries, boats and planes without proper docu-
mentation. And I am subject to other modes of mobility and freedom, enabled by the video instal-
lation: its hyper-montage offers me the opportunity to time-travel and fly through screens, across
multiple centuries and thousands of kilometres, from China to the United Kingdom, reflecting a
kind of problematic mobility typical of the most fetishised forms of globalisation, not least of
which is global contemporary art, including biennales.
In fact, I first saw Ten Thousand Waves at the 2010 Sydney Biennale, which commissioned this
work. Just 4 years after the showing of Waves, the Biennale was subject to intense protests for its
partnership with Transfield. Transfield is an Australian company which specialises in the develop-
ment and management of businesses that are focused on infrastructure – including Australia’s off-
shore detention centres in Manus and Nauru. It is also the founding sponsor of the Biennale,
founded in 1973. The CEO of Transfield, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, was also the Chair of the Sydney
398 Memory Studies 15(2)

Biennale. In 2014, through the writings of the academic Matt Keim (2014), it became apparent that
Transfield had been contracted by the Australian government to operate its camps on Manus and
Nauru for AUD1.2 billion. Transfield, the Biennale’s founding and most significant partner, came
under intense scrutiny and eventually led to an artist boycott of the 2014 Biennale.
As an academic, whose research is focussed on critical border studies, my own capital is bound
to Transfield. UniSuper, the superannuation fund for academics in Australia, was at the time invest-
ing in the company. Furthermore, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, CEO of Transfield, and patron of the arts,
was at one of the lectures I gave on border politics in 2015. He was also sitting in front of me at
Rosi Braidotti lecture on nomadic subjectivity, taking detailed notes on the ethics of collectivity
and nomadic subjectivity.
This montage of events and images, just like Julien’s montage, reflects the precarious ecology –
and institutions – in which I am located, defined by the cohabitation of disjunctive bodies, and
histories. I cannot map my way out of these relations, assume my autonomy, or that there is a
clear-cut position from which to resist. All of these events and axes of power – across finance,
academia and art – shape my location. Such a location foregoes the logic of either/or, us/them. It
is instead nomadic. To be embedded within such a structure is not to deny difference, antagonism.
But it constructs a critically expanded ‘we’ through a feminist politics of affirmation. As Braidotti
(2016) argues, the ‘we’ here is not forged through some kind of naïve universality or bond between
humans, but rather that togetherness, and working with the mess of being embedded and embod-
ied in a network of social relations, may bypass negation as (still) the only viable politic. A poli-
tics of affirmation also asks us to withdraw from investing in constructing ‘new worlds’ (intimately
bound to the logic of revolution and dialectics) and to instead invest in the labour of working with
the worlds – and artworlds – which ‘we’ have already built and of which we are inextricably a part
(Braidotti, 2016).

Institutional counter-memory
As I mentioned prior, Waves brings to the fore my embeddedness within specific worlds/artworlds.
So, I ask once more: what is my politics of location therein? Following the spirit of nomadic sub-
jectivity, I want to avoid the nihilist avant-gardist mantra of ‘death’ to institutions and tradition and
to instead stay ‘with’ the ruins, aftermath of history (tradition even) and the potentiality of the
present.
Such a politics of immanence is simpatico with Gayatri Spivak’s (2012) concept of ‘affirmative
sabotage’. That is, to retool and alter the operations of existing tools/institutions – rather than to
subjecting them to absolute sabotage (termination). It is also aligned with a feminist politics of
maintenance. As feminist conceptual artist Mierle Ukeles Laderman (1969) argues, ‘the politics of
maintenance foregoes the ‘death instinct’ characterised by – ‘separation; individuality; Avant-
Garde par excellence’ – and opts instead for ‘the Life Instinct’: unification; the eternal return; the
perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium’.
The politics of maintenance, like affirmative sabotage, call upon living with legacies, histories and
genealogies as potentiality and futurity rather than as something that is to be aborted.
In this light, it is interesting to turn again to the history, and indeed, counter-memories of the
institutions/worlds of art. The Biennale of Sydney which commissioned Waves, and where I first
encountered the work, has a long history of protests. One can recall, for example, the 1975 protests
around the exclusion of ‘provincial’ Australian artist or the 1980s protests around the exclusion of
women and indigenous artists (Millis, 2016), all of which, like the 2012 boycott of the Biennale
(due to its ties to Transfield, discussed above), have contested the borders of the Biennale and the
limits of its heterogeneity. Such protests begin to show the extent to which artworlds, and
Tello 399

institutions, are mutable through acts of affirmative sabotage and radical maintenance – born out
of the politics of immanence which expands the ‘we’ constituted by distinct yet interconnected
locations.
Over the past decade, artists, curators and writers have increasingly been engaging with the art
practice of ‘institutional critique’ as a means to expand the boundaries and politics of art (Ciric and
Yingqian Cai, 2016; Raunig and Ray, 2009). Institutional critique, simply put, a practice that cri-
tiques art institution’s relationship to power and heteronomous forces, has historically also always
attempted to locate ways for publics and counter-publics to assemble and organise. Aligning with
movements and actions that test the autonomy of art, it has been built on the premise/promise that
‘another artworld is possible’ (echoing the decolonial World Social Forum’s mantra, ‘another
world is possible’, building on Fraser (2005), Ray (2004) and Sheikh (2016)).
Simultaneously, attempts to alter the shape, structure and politics of art worlds/institutions in
the face of divisive border politics and geo-economics have proliferated around the world (see
Tello, 2018a). Ten Thousand Waves, the Transfield protests and artists solidarity with migrant
labourers building the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi are just a few examples and just the tip of the
iceberg. The accumulation of these events culminates in counter-memories of past and contempo-
rary struggles which continually re-construct institutions that embody a radically heterogenous
‘we’. Counter-memory, here, becomes a conceptual tool and method to trace and animate critical
genealogies of immanent resistance – a praxis of immanence through which to reconfigure worlds,
institutions and infrastructures together.

Conclusion
Counter-memory generates cartographies of how life is managed, exploited and maintained. It
enables a social dynamic of resistance, capable of navigating our present historical moment with-
out dialectics. It is a tool of remembrance and living born not out of negation, so the negation of
life or histories, but rather the affirmation of life, of heterogeneity and experimental forms of col-
lectivity. It resists negation. It is attuned to the unprecedented co-dependency of subjects in global
contemporaneity; not the us/them, but the and–and; and the inescapable incommensurability of
what it means to live together in a global space as nomadic subjects.
Counter-memory is akin to nomadic subjectivity and attuned to feminist politics of immanence
– it is mobilised by strategies of affirmative sabotage and radical maintenance. It prioritises hoard-
ing – the hoarding of histories, archives and experience.
It constructs a deep archaeology of violence, but also resistance, to trace the various ways in
which power – as oppression and potentiality as a positive and negative force – manifest.
It values strategies of montage, or assemblage, to keep heterogenous things together, while
maintaining their distinctions (and–and). It insists on the uneven co-presence of subjects, sharing
histories, memories and time without defaulting to universalisms, dualisms or relativisms.
Counter-memory is a conceptual tool and method through which to engage and be present with
the here-and-now; contemporaneity’s excess, its undeniable too-muchness, demands a subject that
is willing to be partial, and always becoming, able to unfold with the present, rather than assume a
static political subjectivity. Counter-memory becomes useful not just for reading the complex poli-
tics of temporality and place in such kaleidoscopic montage works as Handsworth/Waves, but for
working through the complex subjectivities elicited within and in excess of its aesthetic boundaries.
In the spirit of remaining in the here–now, the politics and labour of counter-memory exceed the
singular moment one encounters the artwork or the materiality of the work itself. The politics and
labour of counter-memory exist beyond the confines of the exhibition, the biennial, and manifest in
the materiality of the everyday – in encounters with heterogenous but undeniably interconnected
400 Memory Studies 15(2)

things/events/figures: a superannuation fund, a lecture hall and the act of writing. Counter-memory
is a tool for activating and montaging the hidden or shadowy connections and flow between things/
events/figures – from Waves, to the Biennale of Sydney, to offshore camps, to the Guggenheim Abu
Dhabi, to a lecture delivered by Rosi Braidotti in Sydney, to this author – and for showing that such
a heterogenous assemblage demands a radically immanent subject which is at once able to be in/
with the mess of contemporaneity and be constantly unfolding/becoming with it. This is not a dia-
lectical position, or concept of counter-memory, which might assume that negation engenders an
‘alternative’ outside to hegemonic systems. It is one that instead elicits a subject which is immanent,
attempting to make connections; locating micro points of resistance; living with tension; acknowl-
edging complicity, responsibility and acting from politics of location that is partial and in flux.
Counter-memory, as conceptual tool and method, models a subject that refuses the teleological
logic of dialectical heroic/avant-gardist gestures and revolutions – and visions of a ‘new world’ –
and instead seeks to make something out of what is already here – governed by feminist politics of
maintenance, care and affirmative sabotage. This is why hoarding and hoarder montage – and
sustenance of the discarded, the old, the de-valued through a subjective encounter with images/
events/objects – is key to counter-memory: it registers the continual need to maintain a ‘totally
different form of time’ in the here–now while caring for histories/subjects/things with weakened
connections to the present. Thus, what is at stake here is a critical genealogy of counter-memory
intimately connected to a feminist politics of care, a way of being with and across the radically
heterogenous things/events/locations/subjects that are able to animate the distinct yet intercon-
nected locations that will continually shape the potentiality of contemporaneity. This is not a posi-
tion of pluralism or relativism. But the question remains how such a model of counter-memory can
be read to as a way to maintain heterogeneity and acknowledge the contingency and partiality of
any subjectivity without foregoing the need to resist violence.

ORCID iD
Verónica Tello https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9462-695X

Note
1. I borrow the concept of the and–and from Rosi Braidotti (2018).

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Author biography
Verónica Tello is a Chilean-Australian theorist and historian of contemporary art. Her work focuses on aes-
thetics and technologies of counter-memory/history, bio- and necro-politics and border politics. She is cur-
rently lecturer at UNSW Art & Design and Research Fellow, Rhodes University, South Africa (Arts of Global
South research cluster).