Edna's Archive: Performing Absence in a Troubled Home of Memory

In 2005 the personal papers and photos of Edna Bear were found beside a dumpster in Toronto. This archive was inside a banker’s box: a neat arrangement of photo albums, slides, letters, souvenirs and other objects that trace a life begun in Kitchener, Ontario. In 2009, Edna’s archive was returned to Kitchener, where a group of artists attempted to animate its contents in an interdisciplinary performance. A disused utility building that once housed a bank in the city’s downtown core was chosen for the performance, and suddenly pressing questions about value emerged – the value of the absent woman, of Kitchener’s troubled downtown core, and of the memories contained in the archive. This article is an examination of how various strategies of animation used in performance expose and question a woman’s identity in the context of a specific place. Between the found and the fabricated of environmental staging, between Edna Bear’s archive and her hometown of Kitchener, past and present, there is a play of memory and absence.