Strategic Action Plan
In order to reach these new goals, t.r.a.p. would like to offer educational and consultancy services abroad and virtually. The dream is for T.R.A.P. to act as a haven to explore individual and culturally collective memory practices and share widely. This virtual space will be a safe space for people to join in the discussion, share anonymously, or without using their voice or identity, and find community. T.R.A.P would like to provide this space to recognize healers and black memory workers as archival workers and preservationists. Centering the work of memory workers as archivists reshapes how we think about the archive. At T.R.A.P. the archive is first and foremost embodied. Therefore, our approach to establishing preservation systems, we tend to think of sustainability and survival at the level of the body. What systems do we need to put in place in order to ensure the survival of the work and the body of the individual knowledge producers and memory makers.
Inherently, each plan will appear different since each organization or person faces different challenges and encounters different threats to their life and record. For example, at Muholi Art Institute it is really important to capture images and stories of each individual. These portraits were collected in a book that reflects Zanele Muholi’s project Faces + Phases.
Some of the scholars that guide this work is Michelle Caswell and Tonia Sutherland. Caswell’s "Toward a survivor-centered approach to records documenting human rights abuse: lessons from community archives." is a great model for thinking around ways to preserving knowledge in communities that face multiple threats to their life. Sutherland’s focus on gesture, embodied knowledge, and cultural artifacts found in dance communities and archives is profound and extremely helpful for understanding how we can capture knowledge found in the body.
References
Caswell, Michelle. "Toward a survivor-centered approach to records documenting human rights abuse: lessons from community archives." Archival Science 14, no. 3-4 (2014): 307-322.
Sutherland, Tonia. "Reading gesture: Katherine Dunham, the Dunham Technique, and the vocabulary of dance as decolonizing archival praxis." Archival Science 19, no. 2 (2019): 167-183.
Projections
I recommend my information organization focus on collecting data and information based on the community found in the organization or surrounding the individual. In this data collection, which can be executed through oral histories and interviews, should be captured using video and audio equipment. In order to protect information the individual is unwilling to share, the documentary material and equipment keep the subject aware of the process and the intent of the documentation. By choosing what to share, I believe the community and person will be conscious of their desire to protect.
This strategy comes from my background in live performance, and film and television production. Even though the individual or company representative may appear shy or you may get more information without these recording devices, as a community caretaker, I believe it is more important to protect the individual rather than get more information without cameras and microphones.
I also appreciate the opportunity to discover this strategy while I was working directly with the organization I chose to analyze and advise. While working together, I was approached with producing an interview between the company Emory is wanting to preserve and one the elders that supported the organization early on. Due to the production arrangements, we had to take special care to how the information was going to be captured, received, and shared. This inspired me to use this process to protect individuals from oversharing.
References
Swain, Ellen D. "Oral History in the Archives: Its Documentary Role in the Twenty-First Century," American Archivist 66:1 (Spring - Summer 2003): 139-158.
This project was conducted as part of the CIS 650 (Applying Diversity Leadership Theories and Praxis) class during summer 2023 that involved assessing the web information (and more) to reflect Black feminist performance-based art practices in The Radical Archive of Preservation located in Atlanta, Georgia.