Maria Vittoria Giani on Life in Mexico

Maria Conen on Why have there been no Great Women Artists?

This essay talks about the notion of ‘Greatness’ in the art context. How ‘great’ artists and art is constructed in our society and what this means for female artists. Linda Nochlin shows the patterns according to which art institutions have always been organized and influenced the art scene. These descriptions and observations can probably be […]

Malgeum Kim on The Story of the Shell

Regarding the published art text, I agree with the opinion that there is a standard writing phrase in the contemporary art scene, as the artist Seth Price stated. I believe this perspective also explains a lot of art texts that wander into this specialized field. However, the author, Wonhwa Yoon, uses her unique phrases and […]

Lulu Crouzet on Throwing Like a Girl

Context “Throwing Like a Girl” was first presented in 1977, at a time when feminist theory was engaged with phenomenology and existentialism. Feminist theorists resisted the idea that men and women were the same and pushed for institutional and societal reform because of inherent patriarchal systems. The essay examines how norms shape the feminine movement […]

Lukas Nussbaumer on Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest

From accepted and unaccepted donations Opposite the Kunsthaus on Heimplatz is the Schauspielhaus Zurich: Pfauen. During the National Socialist era, it was the only free theatre stage in the German-speaking world. This made it a centre for German and Austrian actors who emigrated from their home countries, and thus it was also a centre of […]

Lukas Buettner on The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage

The Kunstmuseum Rietberg exhibits its large collection in a very neutral and non-judgemental way. As a result, visitors are quickly tempted to stroll through the rooms at a certain speed and with a certain indifference. The only thing that changes impressively for the visitor is his surroundings. A park, a villa, a bunker. The experience […]

Loudreaders on Unstitching Rex Trueform

Ilze Wolff surveys the biopolitics and white supremacist infrastructures and superstructures of a textile factory building during the years of apartheid in Cape Town. In the form of decolonial radiography, the book dissects and scrutinizes everything, from racist factory legislation to architectural features of racial and gender segregation, to machines that reinvented time through cyclical […]

Loudreaders on The Tertiary

Salas Rivera reexamines in this bilingual book theories of value in Marxist economics and suggests that just as labour is usually the ‘third thing that gives value’, there are also other tertiaries between ‘colonialism and Puerto Rico, queer and transness, the binary of colony and empire.’ Salas Rivera introduces The Tertiary

Loudreaders on The Dispossessed

Part of the reading lists of Loudreader and fiction author Luis Othoniel Rosa, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed presents an interplanetary political fiction about class struggle, anarchism, labour, and power.

Loudreaders on Scenes of Subjection

The fifth chapter of Scenes of Subjection, ‘Fashioning obligation: Indebted Servitude and the Fetters of Slavery’, offers reading to understanding the afterlife of slavery, not as legacy but through the mechanisms that operate today. As contemporary anti-racist feminist movements in colonized territories employ subversive interruptions to coloniality and work through decolonial praxis, it becomes imperative […]

Loudreaders on Queer Cartographies

Madrid-based collective VenidaDevenida introduces Paul B. Preciado’s text on subversive urban cartographies, the post-porn work of Annie Sprinke, and the need to distance from hegemonic and institutional readings of gayness through the eyes of white men in the seventh session of Loudreaders. Building on Preciado’s text, VenidaDevenia proposes architectural interventions that subvert heteronormative readings and […]

Loudreaders on Potential History

By creating a Potential History, Azoulay questions the imperialist construction of time, space, and politics through objects and experiences of struggles around the world, from the original peoples in the Americas to the Congo under King Leopold II. Leopold Lambert loudread Potential History on the seventh session of Loudreaders.

Loudreaders on Nature and Culture

An integral part of the workshops offered in Loudreaders Trade School consists of the elaboration of Post-Colonial postcards that consist on the subversion of the violent landscapes of the Hudson River School of painting and their alliance to Manifest Destiny and settler-occupation of indigenous land.

Loudreaders on Learning to Become an Extremophile

In Learning to Become an Extremophile, Ailo Ribas borrows a term coined by NASA to propose a form of existence based on the adaptation to extreme environments. In the face of constant and extreme threats, the (trans) extremophile redefines survival, learns to move across and between spaces, environments, and relationships.

Loudreaders on Learning From the Virus

For Silvia Federici and Paul B. Preciado, the body is the centre around which capitalism, class, exploitation, and politics turn. Federici rethinks the origins and development of capitalism and a long history of models of resistance from a feminist viewpoint, while Preciado proposes to look at links between community and immunity, health and class, and […]

Loudreaders on Gore Capitalism

Sayak Valencia reads the border between Mexico and the US in Tijuana as a case study of the relationship between hyperviolence and law, militarization and the commodification of death, geopolitical borders, and the ‘post colonies,’ norm and exception, the state of war and states of security and freedom. Gore Capitalism is a critical gospel for […]

Loudreaders on Fronts

In the third session of Loudreaers Trade School, Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller presented their research on the urban simulations of military fronts on the border between the US and Mexico. Fronts: Military Urbanism & the Developing World dissects the potemkinesque simulation of racialized spaces and subjects while setting a dangerous blueprint for architectures of imperialist warfare, […]

Loudreaders on Founding the Feminist Utopia

Traumnovelle co-founder Léone Drapeaud questions patriarchal assumptions about utopias and the city via means of science fiction and feminist utopias that ‘redefine both women’s relationship to motherhood and their relationship to work, hence redefining the city.’

Loudreaders on Farming While Black

Through biographical anecdotes and historical connections, Leah Penniman takes us through an imaginary tour of land reclamation, reparations that go from the settler-colonial occupation of the land, through models of feminist resistance like Combahee River Colony, to today’s strategies to relate to the land as black people. The editors of Deem Journal introduce Farming While Black […]

Loudreaders on Emergent Strategy

For Adrienne Marie Brown Emergent Strategy is ‘how we can intentionally get into the right relationship with the planet and with each other.’ Inspired by Octavia Butler’s ‘all that you touch, you change and all that you touch, changes you back’, Emergent Strategy has been central to the imaginaries of many working for change, including […]

Loudreaders on El Lector

In El Lector, Araceli Tinajero traces the Cuban beginnings and describes the evolution of the loudreaders and the role of iconic figures like the Puerto Rican feminist and anarcho-syndicalist Luisa Capetillo in the tobacco factories across the Caribbean and US as they were able to establish networks of subversive solidarity that promoted emancipatory practices. Among the […]

Loudreaders on Ch’ixinakax utxiwa

Using the indigenous groups of the Andes region as the focal point, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui proposes that indigenous ‘were and are, above all, contemporary beings and peers’ with their own commitment to modernity. Against what she calls the ‘cultural postmodernism, imposed by the elites and reproduced by the state in a fragmented and subordinate way’, […]

Loudreaders on Caliban and the Witch

Federici explores the relationship between primitive accumulation, gender, and race by drawing from the myths that created and hunted witches in Europe and through the Shakespearean character of Caliban. Federici intersects Marx through the evolution of early capitalism in relation to the exploitation of the body of women and workers.

Loudreaders on Bloodchild

Presented in a writing workshop for the production of a Post-Colonial publication, Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild explores a world post-earth where humans are domesticated and controlled by other species in order to carry their reproductive labor. Although Butler claimed that the story is about ‘love’, it impossible to overlook its parallels with colonization, white supremacy, and […]

Loudreaders on Architecture of Counterrevolution

In opposition to article four of the French law of 2005 that states that colonialism in the North of Africa has a ‘positive role’ Samia Henni ‘dissects the effects of’ counterrevolutionary architecture in the ‘transforming of Algerian territory’ and exposes its intrinsic relationship with ‘military manoeuvres, political ideologies, and colonial doctrines.’ Leopold Lambert loudreads Architecture […]

Loudreaders on Anti-Racist Manifesto

One of Puerto Rico’s leading feminist collectives examines how racial states operate, focusing on the colony of Puerto Rico. In this six-point manifesto la colectiva reaffirms, together with the Black feminists who have gone before them – ‘that the liberation of Black women will be the end of all oppression, the end of the racial […]

Loudreaders on Amor y Anarquía

From texts on free love to utopias where workers rob banks and live happily ever after in the countryside, Love and Anarchy is a compendium of texts by Luisa Capetillo, the Puerto Rican anarcho-syndicalist, feminist, and utopian author. Capetillo joined the practice of loudreading in the tobacco factories and added her utopian and feminist imaginaries […]

Loudreaders on Absolute Equality

Loudreader Luisa Capetillo writes about politics, anarchism, solidarity, mutual aid, free love, philosophy, poverty, class, and emancipation in this bilingual compendium.

Lorenzo Iandelli on Diane Simpson : Sculpture + Drawings 1978-2009

A lingering trace of the influence is always present in the work of American Artist Diane Simpson. Her process begins by finding a subject to transform. Taking from the world of applied arts, her research is primarily focused on the female garment and other wearables which enhance bodily proportions, such as Elizabethan petticoats, Amish bonnets […]

Lorena Bassi on Fahrten einer Paria

Escaping her violent husband and her life in France, Flora Tristan embarked on a journey to Peru in 1833 to find her estranged Peruvian family and seek her father’s inheritance to gain financial independence. Tristan returned to France in 1834 and published her travelogue of Peru under the name Pérégrinations d’une Paria 1833– 1834 in […]

Lorena Bassi on Das Bergell

Johanna Garbald-Gredig kam 1840 in Zuoz als Tochter eines Lehrers zur Welt. Mit 21 Jahren heiratete sie den Zolleinnehmer Agostino Garbald und zog mit ihm nach Castasegna im Bergell, wo sich das Paar von Gottfried Semper 1863 eine Villa erbauen liess. Ihre Ehe blieb 16 Jahre kinderlos, wodurch Johanna Zeit hatte sich ihrer Ausbildung und […]

Logan Amont on The Life and Work of Architect Judith Chafee

‘Fuck you Mr. Smith’, wrote a teenage Judith Chafee (1932–1998) to her principle upon graduating (she had found out the board of her high school had revealed her religious origins to the universities she had applied to, which at that time had a limited quota for Jewish students – she was anyway eventually offered admittance […]

Liza Fior on A Little Princess

Liza Fior was one of the first people to contribute an annotation to Women Writing Architecture, and here she is being interrupted and joined by Helen Thomas as she talks about the idea of annotating texts during discussion about A Little Princess, with references to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series of […]

Linda Sjøqvist on The Mediated Plant

Humans see themselves as the centre of their environment, as the highest of the pyramid, the natural environment being there to sustain their race. Each time Western Europe discovers new aspects about living creatures, it directly infantilises them. With agriculture, humans started to fulfill their need for control over their environment to obtain more stability […]

Linda Sjoqvistand and Paul Grieguszies on Testo Junkie

Episode Four of A Book I Love was chosen by Linda Sjoqvist and Paul Grieguszies, the conversation can be listened to here:  

Letter to Charlotte

To: Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, agent provocateur and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, EPFL