Post-Novis began with an exhibition in Omaha, in Maple St. Construct, on February 1, 2009. The exhibition consisted of artworks by Nathalatie Frankowski, Cruz García, Holly Craig and Hilary Wiese as well as the presentation of a collectively authored “Intergalactic” syllabus with Luis Othoniel Rosa. The Post-Novis Collective is also formed by undergraduate and graduate students part of FOLD, a curatorial and publishing seminar offered by WAI Think Tank at the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Members of Post-Novis include: Marwa Al Ka’abi, Alec Burk, Aaron Culliton, Charles Dowd, Ben Friesen, Caleb Goehring, Trevor Kirschenmann, Tyler Koraleski, Jessica Larsen, Collin Meusch, Jordan Morris, Manuel Ruiz, Noah Schacher, Adrian Silva, and Megan Waldron. Find out more about Post-Novis here ➝.
Watch LOUDREADERS Session I (at loudreaders.com) June 19, 2020, in which Cruz García and Nathalie Franksowski discuss in detail the history of Loud Readers in tobacco factories, particularly the works of Luisa Capetillo and that of the scholars, Julio Ramos and Aracely Tinajero.
Very much in the interest of being a useful itinerant library, the LRTS is financing a project to translate and publish into English Julio Ramos’s iconic book in Puerto Rico, Amor y anarquía: Los escritos de Luisa Capetillo. Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán. Forthcoming by the LOUDREADERS Press, as Love and Anarchy: The Writings of Luisa Capetillo and translated into English by the renown Puerto Rican poet Roque/Raquel Salas Rivera, this book is expected to be published by the winter of 2024
This ten-day LOUDREADERS session took place at the School of Architecture at the University of Puerto Rico from June 23 to July 2 of 2023. Find the entire program and description of the event here ➝.
A brief study by Dr. Julio Ramos on the aesthetics of the LRTS is forthcoming in the next number of ARCH Newspaper which was based on Julio Ramos’s LOUDREADERS Session in Puerto Rico during the Summer of 2023.
Some of the books (highly collaborative) that have been published or funded by LRTS include: Cruz García and Nathalie Frankowski (editors). The Planetary Wretched: A Post-Colonial Narrative Architecture and Poetry Book. USA: LOUDREADERS Publishers, 2021. Cruz García and Nathalie Frankowski. A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education. USA: LOUDREADERS Publishers, 2020 (online) 2023 (Printed). Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz García. Universal Principles of Architecture: 100 Architectural Archetypes, Methods, Conditions, Relationships and Imaginaries. USA: Quarto Publishing, 2023. Julio Ramos (translation by Roque/Raquel Salas Rivera). Love and Anarchy: The Writings of Luisa Capetillo. Puerto Rico: LOUDREADERS Publishers, forthcoming 2024. Two books were also made possible through collaborations with the collectives of the LRTS: Luis Othoniel Rosa (art by Hilariy Wiese and translation by Noel Black). Down with Gargamel! USA: Argos Books, 2020; Luis Othoniel Rosa, (art by Guillermo Rodríguez, Nicole Delgado and Amanda Hernández. Translated by Katie Marya and Martina Barinova). Calima. Puerto Rico: La Impresora, 2023.
Critical references for LRTS for establishing the Caribbean as the center of the modern imperialist and capitalist project include: Antonio Benítez Rojo. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. USA: Duke University Press, 1995; Fernando Ortiz (trans. by Harriet de Onís). Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. . USA: Duke University Press, 1996.
The most consistent reference given in the LRTS about how the control of the body of women was crucial at the beginning of capitalism and for its endurance is Silvia Federici. Caliban and the Witch: Woman, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. USA: Autonomedia, 2004.
We are referring to the empires of Spain, Portugal, France, the English, the Dutch, and the USA, all of which (perhaps with the exception of Portugal) battled for control of the Caribbean islands, colonized and exploited them.
For the topic of the Plantationocene, in various LOUDREADERS sessions we have recommended Anna Arabindan Kesson. Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World. USA: Duke University Press, 2021. And also Fernando Ortiz mentioned above. Among the many discussions in LRTS of the plantation system perhaps LOUDREADERS Session 46 with Jason Ftizroy Jeffers and the book The Planetary Wretched (see above) might be a good starting point.
See Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint as cited above.
See Julio Ramos and Álvaro Contretas (eds.). Farmacopea literaria latinoamericana Antología y estudio crítico (1875-1926). 2nda edición. Puerto Rico: La Criba; Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2023.
For a direct reference and critique of the words and actions of the “Puerto Utopia” crypto-billionaires that is often referenced in the LRTS see Naomi Klein. The Battle For Paradise Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. USA: Haymarket Books, 2020. For an in-depth discussion on how Puerto Rico is today an experimental laboratory for debt and neoliberal extraction watch LOUDREADERS Session 23 with the philosopher Rocío Zambrana, and LOUDREADERS Session 19 and LOUDREADERS Session 24 with the poet Raquel Salas Rivera.
Tw okey references often quoted in the LRTS for how Shakespeare’s The Tempest has been “cannibalized” by Caribbean culture see Roberto Fernández Retamar. Todo Calibán. Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón, 2023, and Raquel Salas Rivera. Antes que isla es volcán / Before Island is Volcano. Boston: Beacon Press, 2022.
A discussion about how contemporary urban planning and architecture in Caribbean nations today continue the legacy of 500 years of colonialism was at the center of the ten-day LOUDREADERS session in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2023, specially in the interventions of Isabelle Jolicoeur (Haiti) and the project of Island City Lab (Jamaica). The LRTS recently edited this essay-chronicle, precisely about gentrification in Puerto Rico and the new versions of settler colonialist in the island: Juan Carlos Quiñones. “At the End of the Tunnel: Bad Bunny’s Vid(e)ocumentary Sheds Light (and Music) into Boricuas’ Struggle against Dispossession” in Journal of Architecture Education. Special Issue, Reparations. Volume 77, Issue 1, 2023.
See Sianne Ngai. Ugly Feelings. USA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
For Luisa Capetillo’s concept of the “plurality of habitable worlds” see the iconic Puerto Rican edition of Julio Ramos (ed.). Amor y anarquía: Los escritos de Lusia Capetillo. Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1992, which translation by Roque/Raquel Salas Rivera is forthcoming in the LOUDREADERS Publishers (2024). For the most famous reference (a recurrent one in LRTS) of how the Zapatistas of the EZLN speak about the plurality of worlds see their famous “Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona” EnlaceZapatista.ezln.org.mx, 2005.
From the “Sixth Declaration” cited above.
For a standard reference to the Occupy Wall St. movement see Sara Van Gelder (ed.). This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement. USA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011.
See Roland Végsö. Worldlessness After Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
For the publication of the original poem see the January 2nd, 2013 entry enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx. For the poem and a study of this protest in a historical and critical context see Alvaro Reyes. “Zapatismo: other geographies circa ‘the end of the world’”. in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(3), 408-424.
Reference to Julio Ramos in this series.
See LOUDREADERS Session 45 with Dr. Ilan Pappé about ethnic cleansing in Palestine and the recent genocide in Gaza.
See the forthcoming issue (15) on “Networks of Solidarity”, edited by Cruz García and Nathalaie Frankowski of Revista Informa of the College of Architecture at UPR. Particularly, Nora Akawis piece documenting the “Conference of Butterflies” in which many Palestinian intellectuals and other international figures in solidarity with Palestine held a joint 12 hour seminar style conversation.
We are refering to Kafka’s famous story, “Report to the Academy”.
See LOUDREADERS Session 23.
See Jorge Luis Borges famous story, “Tlön, Uqbr, Orbis Tertuis”. For a discussion about Borges and the Zapatistas see LOUDREADERS Session 25 with Luis Othoniel Rosa.
See LOUDREADERS Session 2 about Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossesed.
See also LOUDREADERS Session 35 with Luis Othoniel Rosa on “Identity and Control.”
See Luis Othoniel Rosa. “Luisa Capetillo or the pedagogy of unruliness” in Small Ave. No. 69, November 2022.