Our bodies are containers of truth and culture that shape our social world. How do we extend what we know about archives to the preservation of embodied knowledge in Black performance communities underrepresented in the archives? This workshop explores radical archiving methods, strategies, and practitioners doing the work. Explore when archiving becomes a radical act; what it's like to work with politically radical collections, and how to identify, organize, and catalog radical archives by preserving anarachival materiality.
Radical Archiving shares some good practices when preserving performance-based movement cultures from documenting soundscapes, producing oral histories, looking in the margins, to preparing living collections for repositories. The workshop will start with some archival theories at the base of these practices; followed by an overview of radical archivists and collections; and end with a discussion of radical archiving strategies.
Dr. shady Radical is a performance archivist and founder of The Radical Archive of Preservation.
Her practice combines ritual with resistance to support the production and preservation of movement practices found in Black communities. Often, she uses exhibition and live performance to pull anarchival material out of traditional archives to activate silences and erasures attributed to forms of subjugation. As a project-based archivist, Dr. Radical works with performance-based collections in identifying archival material, organizing, cataloging, describing, and facilitating transfers to institutional archives.
Dr. Radical has worked with companies like Ballethnic Dance Company, Tyler Perry Studios, and Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade Costumes, as well as independent artists like Designer Derron Cherry. She recently completed a PhD in Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University and has also earned an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from New York University and B.A. in Art History from The College of Saint Elizabeth; and an A.A. in Fashion Marketing. Dr. Radical is a certified archivist and serves as Assistant Chair for Society of Georgia Archivists’ Education Committee. As of August 2022, Dr. Radical teaches Art History as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Spelman College.
This event is a hybrid format. There are both in-person and virtual options.
