'Loudreading Post-Colonial Landscapes' Lecture Presented Online on Jan. 25

Image courtesy of WAI Architecture Think Tank

Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia, co-founders of WAI Architecture Think Tank, will present a virtual public lecture on Jan. 25 as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design's spring lecture series.

Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia will present the virtual lecture “Loudreading Post-Colonial Landscapes” at 4 p.m. Monday, Jan. 25, as part of the spring lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

Frankowski and Garcia are co-founders of WAI Architecture Think Tank, a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. They are also assistant professors at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. Frankowski is a French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet, and Garcia is a Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist.

The Fay Jones School's spring lecture series is presented in collaboration with Places Journal, an internationally respected online journal of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism, and the University of Arkansas Office for Diversity and Inclusion. The series is also made possible in part by a gift from Ken and Liz Allen of Fayetteville, part of an overall set of commitments the Allens have made to the school's programs and initiatives in diversity, equity and inclusion.

Registration for the entire lecture series is available on Zoom.

In their lecture, "Loudreading Post-Colonial Landscapes," Frankowski and Garcia will explore how, under the increasingly global regime of necropolitical exploitation and capitalist extraction, the brutal forces once exerted on the colonies expand beyond the confines of occupied territories. In this depleting world of irreversible geomorphic transformations, incessant political paraphernalia and monumental ideological symbols, Post-Colonial imaginaries outline the possibility to render new, solidary and critical worlds.

Learning from the persecuted alternative practice of education performed in the tobacco factories of the Caribbean of the 20th century where lectores (Loudreaders) would share anti-capitalist and emancipatory literature with workers who were denied any other form of formal education, Garcia and Frankowski continuously search for critical forms of architecture. Through the development of manifestos and narrative architecture projects, new curricula and pedagogical experiments, publications and curatorial platforms, alternative forms of public engagement and works of anti-capitalist realism, they pursue models for Loudreading the possibility of other, pluriversal, anti-racist, intersectional and emancipating worlds.

Founded by Frankowski and Garcia in Brussels during the financial crisis of 2008, WAI Architecture Think Tank is one of several platforms of public engagement that includes the Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade school Loudreaders.

Garcia and Frankowski are visiting lecturers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and are former Ann Kalla Professors at Carnegie Mellon University, Hyde Chairs of Excellence in Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Visiting Teaching Fellows at 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 in New York, Neues Museum in Nuremberg and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon.

They are authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto (Rotterdam: NAI010 Publishers, 2020), Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture (London: Artifice Books on Architecture, 2013; Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press, 2021), A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education Architecture (Blacksburg: Loudreaders, 2020), and the upcoming book From Black Square to Black Reason: A Post-Colonial Architecture Manifesto.

Through the constant ethos of asking "What about it," WAI Architecture Think Tank is a workshop for architecture intelligentsia that speculates on the possibility of workshops for anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, anti-alienating, anti-imperialist or anti-heteropatriarcal imaginaries.

In addition to their public lecture, Garcia and Frankowski will conduct two virtual workshops with Fay Jones School students in February, "How-to Workshop of Post-Colonial Landscapes and Post-Colonial Rooms" and "Workshop of Anti-Racist Diagrams and Manifestos."

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects.

This virtual lecture is open to the public. For details on watching the lecture, please visit the Fay Jones School's lecture page. To register for the entire lecture series, complete this form on Zoom.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu.