Making the most out of staying safe at home during quarantine, Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz García’s WAI Architecture Think Tank launches a series of weekly online sessions that each feature a different LOUDREADER. Each LOUDREADER will select a book or a series of books as background to discuss urgent positions on the state of architecture, urbanism, art, and culture with a live-audience through a Zoom-meeting format. Produced in collaboration with inter·punct, these events will be a great opportunity for students and faculty to interact with practitioners, architects, designers, thinkers, authors, and artists from around the globe.
The first five sessions are:
April 4: The first session welcomes Brussels, Paris, and Charleroi-based practice Traumnovelle, curators of Eurotopia, the Belgian Pavillion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.
April 11: The second event will be Inter·Face, a quarantine-reading session led by inter·punct.
April 18: Garcia and Frankowski, 2019-20 Ann Kalla Co-Professors in Architecture, are planning the digital book release of their publication Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto and a conversation with inter·punct and series of guests.
April 25: Los Angeles-based Andrew Kovacs (Studio Kovacs) will assume the LOUDREADER duties.
May 2: The fifth installment features Ilze Wolff from Cape Town, South Africa.
More events will follow with a diverse group of scheduled speakers from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The entire CMU community is welcome to join on these LOUDREADER sessions and to follow them once made available online.
The sessions will be presented in Zoom meetings, with details released ahead of each presentation. WAI will also live-stream the sessions through Facebook and make the recordings available on their website following each session.
About LOUDREADERS
While the unprecedented pandemic linked to the global spread of COVID-19 presents the imminent cancellation and postponement of lectures, exhibitions, and presentations, and the daunting prospect of alienating labor, the upcoming months also provide a unique opportunity to establish networks of intellectual solidarity and alternative forms of critical pedagogy.
LOUDREADERS is a cross between podcast, YouTube channel, Zoom meeting, lecture series, digital curatorial program, and online workshop that establishes networks of solidarity around the world while discussing urgent positions, discourses, and media about architecture, urbanism, art, and culture.
LOUDREADERS borrows its name from an alternative practice of education in the 20th-century created as tobacco workers engaged in the boring labor of rolling cigars hired one of their own who knew how to read, to read for them during the entire workday. As the practice of loud-reading grew, the lectores (loud-readers) would become traveling performers with an international audience, creating networks of solidarity all around the Caribbean as well as a massive, shared, and open access oral library to workers who were denied any other form of formal education. The books that these lectores read for the workers were mostly books of philosophy or literature that shared an emancipatory imagination.
As part of the program each guest becomes a LOUDREADER while selecting a book or a series of publications as a point of departure to engage with an online community.
In search of ways to render emancipatory imaginations, LOUDREADERS creates an accessible library of oral and visual presentations established through collaborations with students, practitioners, educators, authors, thinkers, and members of the international community.