Under the colonial construction of time, the Caribbean is now 532 years into loudreading planetary futures. Here, radical struggles for emancipation, solidarity, and worldmaking subsist despite the planetary scale destruction and repression born out of its tropical plantations. From this mountain range/archipelago, the imperial blueprint of capitalist spoliation has spread across the rest of the planet in the form of military occupations, colonial debt, and planned precarity, and in the technologies of racialization, surveillance, incarceration, and policing.

Loudreading is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, WAI Architecture Think Tank, and Loudreaders Trade School supported by the Mellon Foundation, re:arc institute, the Graham Foundation, Producer Hub, Iowa State University, GSA Johannesburg, Universidad de Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras, and the inaugural ACSA Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture. ​

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8 essays
Borders are like burials. They enclose the land and the people and the more-than-human beings who inhabit it. Borders inhume possibility by limiting interactions between complex ecologies, disregarding the ever-changing dreams of the commons and disrupting the “movements and migrations” of bodies in transit.
Dorraine Duncan and Jhordan Channer
Infrastructure cannot be separated from the long history of Western imperialism that is manifested in Caribbean spaces through intense dependency.
Nadia Huggins
Sand is a material that I have often overlooked. At the same time, I can be overwhelmed by the immensity of it, and the idea that each tiny grain, once amassed in large quantities, determines how coastlines form and evolve over time.
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Algarabía: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle of Alarabíyaa (Graywolf Press, 2025) is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being that retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf.
History is certainly not the sole province of cinema, but, as an art form, it is tremendously powerful in allowing people to see other possibilities, other histories, other futures, other perspectives—even within oneself, inside one’s own community.
Given that architecture is responsible for creating spaces and experiences for society, privileging visual gratification based on an aesthetic concept of beauty doesn’t only thwart and limit the potential appreciation of these spaces, it also signifies an absence of truth and purpose as much for the architect as for the communities they serve.
Luis Othoniel Rosa
The voice of the Loudreader does not explain because explaining is a form of ruling. She just tells stories of breakaways, of collectives that defeated loneliness, of worldmakers of the past that conjure other futures. “This world is a bubble” she reads, “put a knife to it.”
Nathalie Frankowski, Cruz Garcia, and e-flux Architecture
Under the colonial construction of time, the Caribbean is now 532 years into loudreading planetary futures. Here, radical struggles for emancipation, solidarity, and worldmaking subsist despite the planetary scale destruction and repression born out of its tropical plantations.
Category
Architecture, Colonialism & Imperialism, Indigenous Issues & Indigeneity
Subject
Global South, Caribbean, Extractivism

Loudreading is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, WAI Architecture Think Tank, and Loudreaders Trade School supported by the Mellon Foundation, re:arc institute, the Graham Foundation, Producer Hub, Iowa State University, GSA Johannesburg, Universidad de Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras, and the inaugural ACSA Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture. ​

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