June 23–July 2, 2023
Loudreaders is a free and accessible platform of public architectural pedagogy. In the form of a trade school, it explores spatial and land practices and imaginaries at the intersection of society, culture, and ecology. A planetary school with roots in the Caribbean, Loudreaders engages through networks of intellectual solidarity the many fields, lands, territories, narratives, journeys, and imaginations that make and remake a dynamic, historic, and evolving geopolitical network of landscapes and peoples. Following the concept of vocational education, since its foundation in 2020 the Trade School offers “how-to” workshops and loudreading sessions, a publishing platform, as well as the study of critical and affirmative thinking by designers, artists, architects, spatial practitioners, activists, philosophers, creative writers, and scholars.
Trade School 2023: Puerto Rico
Loudreaders will produce a series of pedagogical events, including a pilot on-site Trade School in Puerto Rico during the summer of 2023, and a fully accessible online participatory platform, archive, and publication series. Through grants, fellowships, publishing, and public events Loudreaders supports the coalescence of a wide range of spatial practitioners in the Caribbean and its extensions. This will include, but will not be limited to, designers, architects, historians, authors, philosophers, planners, scientists, policy makers, activists, and artists dealing with race, class, gender, disability, and ecology. The outcomes of the projects produced with the grants will be part of the public publishing platforms, and will be presented during public lectures, workshops, and events, and made freely available and accessible online.
Background
Loudreaders borrows its name from an alternative practice of education in the beginning of the 20th century. The practice was simple. Tobacco workers transformed the monotonous labor of rolling cigars by hiring one of their own to read for them during the entire workday. As the practice of loud-reading grew, lectores (loud-readers) became travelling performers with an international audience, fostering networks of solidarity around the Caribbean, as well as a massive, shared, and open-access oral library for workers who were denied any other means of formal education.
In their effort to seek collective liberation, loudreaders like Puerto Rican feminist, anarcho-syndicalist, and utopian author Luisa Capetillo shifted the practice of loudreading from “classics” of Western literature, to philosophy and literature that shared an emancipatory, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist imagination.
Today, as spatial practices take numerous forms that shape and reshape the Caribbean, Loudreaders trade school considers the broad influence and possibilities of architecture and related fields in understanding the histories of the region while fomenting the construction of critical visions of the future.
Through the study of the ways in which emancipatory spatial practices are forged in the Caribbean and around the world, Loudreaders asks how can these models of spatial and land thinking help generate alternatives to the ways in which we engage with urgent planetary questions?
Fellowships
Fellowships will be awarded to fund alternative forms of pedagogy to be shared during the year-long online and in-person summer sessions of the Loudreaders Trade School. The Loudreaders fellowship continues the mission of a pedagogical platform built by networks of solidarity of traveling performers sharing emancipatory imaginaries across the Caribbean and beyond.
Loudreaders invites collectives, spatial practitioners, architects, planners, artists, writers, activists, philosophers, and theorists to participate in the first on-site iteration of the trade school.
Enrollment
Attendance to all the sessions of Loudreaders Trade School in Puerto Rico is free of cost. Students of the 10-day trade school session will receive a Loudreaders Certificate.
Information on the requirements and application process for the fellowships and enrollment can be found on Loudreaders website.
Publications
Held virtually and in-person, all sessions of Loudreaders are free and open to the public. A growing archive of sessions can be found on loudreaders.com.
Loudreaders publishes urgent topics in book form.
Organization
Founded by Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Architecture Think Tank, LOUDREADERS is fiscally sponsored by The Tank via The Producer Hub, and supported by the Mellon Foundation and re:arc institute.
