Andrew Houston & Lisa O’Connell, (Kitchener / Waterloo, ON), Edna’s Archive: Learning to Perform Memory/Learning to Perform Forgetting, Performance and artifacts, Critical Media Lab, 195 King Street West, Kitchener. Photos: Gordon Hatt.

 

Edna's Archive is a performance installation about memory. It begins with a banker's box abandoned by the dumpster of a high-rise apartment. On the top of the box, neatly labeled in bold, black lettering reads "Edna Bear." Inside jam-packed and meticulously arranged, are more than 1700 artifacts of a real life lived in Kitchener. The work invites a consideration of how life is given value, how it is marked and unmarked through various rituals of the archive, where the traces of what remains offer sublime contemplation of what was and what might still be. Edna's Archive is a co-production between the IMPACT Theatre Festival and CAFKA with support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Centre of Art and Technology at the University of Waterloo.

 

Edna’s Archive was a coproduction between the IMPACT Theatre Festival and CAFKA with support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Centre of Art and Technology at the University of Waterloo.