On December 14th & 15th, the International Center of Photography in New York hosted Memories Can't Wait, a two-day symposium jointly organized by the ICP-Bard MFA program and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. It investigated the different artistic strategies used to rethink the ways to produce, document and archive. Memory is intricately linked to forms of documentation, from news journalism to handwritten letters. Yet, the 1980's postmodern critique of representation has shattered the myth of documentary veracity and a singular authoritative history. This merciless critique of documentary has created fertile ground for new and meaningful ways to engage with the idiom.

 Renée Ridgway took part in this two-day event with her lecture entitled 'The Living Proof: Strategizing a Performative Archive' in which she discussed the politics of the production of archives, their structure, content as well as their status as cultural artefacts with potential societal use value playing a significant role. Excerpts from the archive, which she finds or those she creates are living, growing, evolving whether they are collections of 17th c. documents, libraries full of maps, online video collections, databases of audio recordings or results from Freedom of Information Act requests. For Memories Can't Wait she discussed her recent exhibitions 'The Revelation of the Concealed: Politics (In) Forms' (January 20-March 23rd, 2012) at Onomatopee in Eindhoven, 'The Unwanted Land' (2011) and 'The Wanted Land' (2012), exhibitions in both the Netherlands and India that reference the 17th century archival document 'Hortus Malabaricus'.