A Great Loudreading
Back to «Programme»A Great Loudreading continues the radical practice of education performed in the tobacco factories of the Caribbean at the beginning of the 20th century. The practice was simple. While tobacco workers engaged in the alienating labor of rolling cigars, they would hire one of their own to read aloud for them during the entire work-day. By reading critical, utopian, and subversive texts, Loudreaders helped shape an anti-capitalist, decolonial imagination as workers established bonds around mutual aid and networks of solidarity. A Great Loudreading combines contemporary and historical forms of loudreading as global networks construct emancipatory imaginaries in the collective construction of other worlds.
WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. Founded in Brussels during the financial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade-school Loudreaders. Based on the emancipating and persecuted alternative practice of education performed by lectores like Luisa Capetillo in the tobacco factories in the Caribbean, Loudreaders is an open pedagogical platform and free trade school that engages with architectural education as a form of mutual aid and critical solidarity in the age of Covid-19.
Their work has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Neues Museum in Nuremberg, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon. They are authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and the upcoming book From Black Square to Black Reason: A Post-Colonial Architecture Manifesto.
Through the constant ethos of asking ‘What about it’, WAI Architecture Think Tank is a workshop for architecture intelligentsia that speculates on the possibility of:
Workshops for Anti-Racist Imaginaries
Workshops for Anti-Ableist Imaginaries
Workshops for Anti-Capitalist Imaginaries
Workshops for Anti-Alienating Imaginaries
Workshops for Anti-Imperialist Imaginaries
Workshops for Anti-Heteropatriarcal Imaginaries
www.waithinktank.com
www.loudreaders.com
