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The Radical Archive of Preservation captures the community narratives of Black Women and performance-based artists through living archives, oral histories, and digital artifacts. Soutron gives their team the tools to catalog, organize, and share that work with the public.
T.R.A.P. holds a unique collection of ephemera, interview transcripts, costume records, choreography notes, and performance links that don’t fit a traditional archive model. Soutron’s customizable search portal and digital artifact storage gave Dr. Shady Radical and her team a platform built around how their collection actually works, not how a conventional library expects it to.
Established in 2019, The Radical Archive of Preservation (T.R.A.P.), based in Atlanta, has a mission to preserve the community narratives of Black Women and performance-based artists through consultation, collaboration, performance and scholarship.
“Soutron is used to store our performance-based stories and make them available to the public.”
Dr Shady Radical,. MLIS, M.A., PhD, CA
The Radical Archive Founder and Performance Archivist
Founder and Performance Archivist Dr. Shady Radical, MLIS, M.A., PhD, CA, has challenged herself to use archival research and scholarship to capture the important heritage stories of Black Women in unique and powerful ways, creating and capturing performances and rituals that lead to the recognition and appreciation of the culture.
As a performance-based archive, Dr. Radical employs performative archival techniques such as storytelling, reenactment through dance, and oral history to create “Living Archives”. The challenge is to make these performances and associated materials available to the public.
T.R.A.P. isn’t a typical static collection, rather the collection’s artifacts capture the communities’ relationships, strategies of resistance and care rituals that preserve the communities’ character, constitution and constituency.
T.R.A.P. exposes how much of their cultural history is found in performance-based work when they preserve embodied knowledge, dance, movements and oral traditions.
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The T.R.A.P. catalog contains ephemera from past performances, including links to the dancers, the choreographers, interview transcripts, costumes and much more.
“This information really helps the public, internal operations, and people who are interested in studying, researching, and writing about performative memory work,” states Dr. Radical.
Ease of Use
T.R.A.P. workers, also known as students, interns, archivists and differently situated memory workers, bring the past into the present by capturing, organizing and cataloging ephemera and archival performance material.
Offering Archival Services designed to support performance-based artists, professionals and companies, Dr. Radical uses Soutron Archive to store digital cultural artifacts and make them available to their communities and the public.
Customization
The ease of customization of Soutron’s search portal has provided the ability to create custom search categories for materials, costume designers, dancers, and more, providing for the exposure of materials associated with the performance work being undertaken.
Searches can be easily filtered for results or tabbed to directly, as can be seen in their search portal: www.soutron.com/trap
With a focus on Black Women and performance-based artists, T.R.A.P works to curate, preserve and present these cultural memories in a digital format.
“By digging into institutional memories and personal stories, we can creatively preserve these narratives for the future,” states Dr. Radical. “Oftentimes, the performance copy we have documenting those stories is the only artifact available that tells the complete story. Soutron is used to store our performance-based stories and make them available to the public.”
These performances honor and validate the historical agency that Black Women have experienced and their contributions to society, keeping this cross-generational history alive.
To find out more about The Radical Archive of Preservation (T.R.A.P.) and the work they do, visit:
www.theradicalarchive.com
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The first step is to learn more. Here's how we can answer your questions:
Yes. Soutron Archive is designed to handle diverse digital artifact types including video recordings, oral history transcripts, costume records, choreography notes, and performance links. T.R.A.P. uses Soutron to catalog and share exactly this kind of non-traditional collection.
Yes. Soutron's search portal is customizable. T.R.A.P. configured custom search categories for dancers, costume designers, choreographers, and performance materials, giving the public a way to browse and filter the collection in a way that reflects how it is organized and used.
Yes. Soutron is designed to support teams of varying sizes and skill levels. At T.R.A.P., students, interns, archivists, and community memory workers all contribute to cataloging and organizing the collection within the same platform.
Yes. Soutron Archive stores digital cultural artifacts and makes them accessible to communities and researchers. For T.R.A.P., this means preserving performance records that are often the only surviving documentation of a community story, keeping cross-generational history available for future study.
