Loudreaders launches Architecture Trade School 2023 in Puerto Rico

 Loudreaders, a planetary school with roots in the Caribbean, tackles the myriad fields, regions, territories, tales, voyages, and imaginations that build and remake a dynamic, historic, and developing geopolitical network of landscapes and peoples through networks of intellectual solidarity. Since its inception in 2020, the Trade School has provided “how-to” workshops and loudreading sessions, as well as a publishing platform and 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 host a series of educational activities, including a pilot on-site Trade School in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2023, as well as a fully accessible online interactive platform, archive, and publication series. Loudreaders fosters the convergence of a diverse spectrum of spatial practitioners in the Caribbean and its extensions through grants, fellowships, publishing, and public events. Designers, architects, historians, authors, philosophers, planners, scientists, policymakers, activists, and artists dealing with race, class, gender, disability, and environment will be included, but not limited to. The results of the initiatives funded by the funds will be included in public publishing platforms, presented at public lectures, seminars, and events, and made publicly available and accessible online.

Background
Loudreaders takes its name from an alternative educational approach that existed at the turn of the twentieth century. The exercise was straightforward. Tobacco workers made the boring task of rolling cigars more interesting by hiring one of their own to read for them during the shift. As the practice of loud-reading spread, lectores (loud-readers) became traveling performers with an international audience, building solidarity networks throughout the Caribbean, as well as a large, shared, and open-access oral library for workers who had no other means of formal education.

Loudreaders such as Puerto Rican feminist, anarcho-syndicalist, and utopian author Luisa Capetillo altered the practice of loudreading away from “classics” of Western literature and toward philosophy and literature that shared an emancipatory, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist imagination.

Today, as spatial practices affect and reshape the Caribbean in a variety of ways, Loudreaders trade school addresses the broad significance and possibilities of architecture and allied areas in comprehending the region’s past and fostering the building of crucial future visions.

Loudreaders investigates how emancipatory spatial practices are produced in the Caribbean and around the world, asking how these models of spatial and land thinking can help generate alternatives to how we engage with crucial planetary challenges.

Fellowships
Fellowships will be offered to fund alternative types of pedagogy to be presented during the Loudreaders Trade School’s year-long online and in-person summer programs. The Loudreaders fellowship expands on the mission of a pedagogical platform developed by solidarity networks of touring performers exchanging emancipatory imaginaries across the Caribbean and beyond.

Loudreaders welcomes collectives, spatial practitioners, architects, planners, artists, writers, activists, philosophers, and theorists to take part in the trade school’s first on-site iteration.

Enrollment
Attendance at all Loudreaders Trade School sessions in Puerto Rico is free of charge. Loudreaders Certificates will be awarded to students who complete the 10-day trade school course.

The Loudreaders website has information on the prerequisites and application process for fellowships and enrollment.

Publications
All Loudreaders sessions, both virtual and in-person, are free and available to the public. Loudreaders.com has a growing archive of sessions.

Loudreaders publishes urgent topics in book form.