Post-Novis with WAI Think Tank : A Great LOUDREADING is in the Making. But No One has Noticed.

On the call of “WORLDMAKERS UNITE!,” a traveling group of performers gathers in sessions all around the world to produce and disseminate emancipatory propaganda. Under the title Post-Novis (named after a combination of post-colonial and in commemoration of the collectivist group Unovis) the collective continues the banned practice originated in tobacco factories of the Caribbean of loudreading anti-capitalist, feminist, utopian, and anti-colonialist literature. Loudreading is simple. Workers who didn’t have any means of formal education, would choose one of their own to loudread during the entire workday. The practice of reading aloud classics and the news was transformed by loudreaders like Puerto Rican anarcho-syndicalist, feminist, and utopian author Luisa Capetillo who read about the emancipation of workers, women, land, and love, and helped forge an anti-capitalist imagination built on networks of solidarity.

In the centenary memorial of Capetillo, as anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, transfeminist, and emancipatory struggles consolidate at a planetary scale, the practice of Loudreading becomes ever more imminent.

A Great LOUDREADING is in the Making. But No One has Noticed borrows the title of Robert Musil’s last, unfinished chapter, to loudread worldmaking sessions in the heart of Vienna.

A Great LOUDREADING is in the Making. But No One Has Noticed turns MAGAZIN into:
a tribune for loudreading post-colonial imaginaries
a stage for performing post-colonial Plays
a workshop for the production of post-colonial propaganda
an archipelago of broken effigies and defaced monuments
a living garden of historicized, fetishized, objectified, displaced, commodified botanical species
a collage of tropical opacity and avant-garde icons

Post-Novis is
Nathalie Frankowski & Cruz Garcia / WAI Architecture Think Tank
Luis Othoniel Rosa
Hilary Wiese
Holly Craig
Ophelia S. Chan
Rose Florian
Christopher Rey Perez

WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. Founded in Brussels in 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 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. Garcia and Frankowski are Associate Professors at Iowa State University, faculty atColumbia University, and have held visiting professorships at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The School of Architecture at Taliesin. 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 Universal Principles of Architecture.

MAGAZIN is an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna run by Jerome Becker, Matthias Moroder and Florian Schafschetzy. MAGAZIN presents the work of local and international architects in solo exhibitions that are especially conceived for the spaces in the Weyringergasse location—framed by corresponding lectures, panel discussions and publications.