For the Community Analysis, I will focus on system-centric feedback. I will engage the administrators and their needs, wants, and expectations for the organization. I will assess my organization in relation to the African American Art and Culture Collection at Emory University’s Rose Library and how this as an agency meets the expectations and needs of my organization.
My organization, The Radical Archive of Preservation’s, stakeholders are BIPOC, artists, and small performance and production companies, people of all ages. TRAP is particularly interested in creative ways to preserve, keep, and share knowledge that lives in the body. TRAP studies performance culture, art, and Black intellectual thought in order to bring in new ideas of preservation and sharing. TRAP will also activate archival material using a performance practice. TRAP believes one way we can tip the scales of justice towards equality and equity for all is to have everyone equally represented in the archive and history. People should have equal access to information in order to be able to tell their own story.
Since TRAP is invested in the ways that Black women tell, keep, and share stories alot of scholarship comes from Black feminist thought. Ain’t I a Woman, a 1981 book published by bell hooks is one of the grounding texts used at T.R.A.P. hooks assess the affects of racism and sexism on the Civil Rights movement. Saidiya Hartman’s writings offer different ways to approached embodied knowledge in her texts Scenes of Subjection, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; and Lose Your mother. Hartman encourages you to think critically about your environment and rely on what you know inside to live, struggle, and survive. Lastly, Fred Moten’s In the Break and Cedic Robinson’s Black Marxism offer political economic perspectives to the question of race and blackness in this society.
In the future, T.R.A.P. would be able 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. T.R.A.P would like to connect these memory workers with other individuals needing this work in the community. Recently, the founder of T.R.A.P. traveled to South Africa to promote the workshop and connect with communities who are responsible for community memory. Muholi Art Studio acts as a production center with various artists working in different mediums towards a common goal. Muholi the artists and the company are invested in combating the deadly stigmas and homophobia in the communities. Muholi not only give the artists platforms to speak out and tell their truth, she offers the art studio as a place you can come learn a skill that would/could benefit the individual. This type of collaboration expands the offerings and scope of material through each organization. T.R.A.P. still struggles with measuring the effectiveness and success of projects because it is so young. However, in the future T.R.A.P. will offer surveys to access their performance and impact on the community.
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.