50 years of memory. Open to you.
Explore CCCADI’s 50-year Living Archive through stories, images, and moving memory from across the African Diaspora.
The Community Archiving Lab for Culture and Justice enters its second phase with the Archiving Lab Digital Hub, an online space where the public can explore CCCADI's Living Archive.
Through essays, archival footage, oral histories, photographs, and curated collections, the Digital Hub connects over fifty years of African Diasporic cultural history to the present moment. Organized through the storytelling chapters of CCCADI's 50th Anniversary, the archive becomes a living narrative of culture, community, and justice.
The Lab, in its second PHASE.
Last year, the Community Archiving Lab for Culture and Justice lived in the building. An installation at the Center, open to the public, with programming and digitization days, Phase One of the Lab brought the community in to be a part of our archiving process.
That work has not stopped.
The Lab space is still here. We are still digitizing, still holding the material. What changes is who can reach it. The Digital Hub takes what the installation did in one room over a few months and opens it to anyone, anywhere, for good.
This is Phase Two. Same Lab. Wider door.
Co-Presented with the new PMCA (Harlem Place Memory Culture Archive)
The Digital Hub is the online home of the Community Archiving Lab for Culture and Justice. Here, visitors can explore CCCADI's archive through curated collections that highlight the artists, movements, and cultural traditions that have shaped the African Diaspora.
The Archiving Lab
THE HUB COMBINES ARCHIVAL STORYTELLING WITH DIGITAL ACCESS THROUGH:
This digital extension keeps the archive accessible, alive, and in conversation with the communities it represents.
EXPLORE THE ARCHIVE BY STORY CHAPTER
CCCADI's Living Archive is organized through the storytelling chapters of our 50 year history. Each chapter highlights a different dimension of Afro-Diasporic history and community life in New York City and beyond.
The Archival Dispatch is the voice of the Community Archiving Lab for Culture and Justice.
Through essays, archival reflections, and research notes, this space explores the stories behind CCCADI’s Living Archive and the cultural movements that live within it.
These dispatches provide deeper historical context and interpret the archive through the perspectives of archivists, artists, scholars, and community members.
The Screening Room brings the visual archive to life through short films, archival footage, and video essays drawn from CCCADI’s collections.
Content includes:
Archival footage and oral history excerpts
Mini documentary edits and artist interviews
Thematic video essays and then/now comparisons
New short-form videos and reels produced through CCCADI’s New Media work feed directly into the Screening Room, creating an ongoing visual record of AFro-diasporic cultural life.
The ArchivING Lab Circle is a community of cultural stewards who keep CCCADI's Living Archive preserved and reachable.
Members go deeper: CCCADI Studios, The Griot Desk, member sessions. Membership sustains the ongoing work of documenting Afro-Diasporic cultural history while opening the archive wider.
Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa, Resident Archivist
“We really are rediscovering history all over again. The uncovered CCCADI Archive has been holding an extraordinary amount of Afro-Latin American and African American documents from Brazil, Peru, Cuba, Nigeria, everywhere! It’s our privilege to dust off those pages and realize that we’ve been here— speaking, sentient, revolutionary beings, all along.”
Maria Bear, Resident Archivist
"This is a collection that transports us in time and space. Right there on 125th street, CCCADI holds a portal, or rather many portals, that show us what it means to weave a community together. Through each of these materials, we connect with our collaborators and our kin on both sides of the Atlantic, to our ancestors and to our descendants, as we work together to keep the story alive."
