Skyrise for Harlem - June Jordan
Who is the card reader laying a spread if not a poet experimenting with non-linear narrative forms to best represent the memories, hopes, and prophecies of their errant wanderings?
In the spread is a divinatory form in which we hurl words into the world. It is a compositional art. Images, words, cards, all a gorgeous juxtaposition. A spread is a story we tell ourselves, a way we listen to the stories of our ancestors, a way the oracle whispers, sings, recites us a sonnet. Divination decidedly pronounces a politics of the future perfect. What-will merges into the has-happened. Its a paradox enlivening the ontological dead. Decolonization is versed in this vernacular.
What the telos of laying a spread? It’s lonely hands laying, looking for the card, the cards, that hold an otherwise way of living; a way to cope, a way to survive the present without resorting to violence.
A spread is a mapping of the underbelly of our social reality. These readers are rogue. We puncture the paradox prophecy presents as portal to a future that is feral, in that it’s unruly in its pursuit of possibility.
Renee Gladman, Prose Architectures
For the readers who are poets scribbling over an endless black page till they inscribe themselves in the blur between prose, architecture and prophecy. I am announcing the next iteration of the Fold Out is open for enrollment.
Our goal is to think dynamically of spread design as an architextural practice, and license ourselves to be paper architects.
The spread is fundamental to the reading. No matter free-formed or well established, the spread is what directs the reading, providing orientation, space, movement and flow for consciousness-raising and catharsis.
In the mapping of new worlds, justice is spatial. The red reader writing spreads is reworking the remnants of the materials, places—that have hemmed us in or crucified us—toward communal thriving and harmonious, liberatory co-habitation.
The goal in this class is for you to think dynamically, critically about spread design, with a tool kit to pull from when designing future spreads and to relate these reading tools to ritual structures for writing. Essentially, reading tarot leads to errant writing, a wandering poem, attending the shape of a story.
6-week intensive
August 11-Sept 15, Tuesdays at 3:45 pm PT
Our primary muse is the initimable June Jordan:
“If man is to have not only a future but a destiny, it must be consciously and deliberately designed.”
Jordan’s design work offers political principles for reimagining space at multiple scales by directly questioning how more livable, beautiful worlds may be wrought from the material contexts in which we presently live.
I want to invite, like Jordan, the reader into a powerful political and spatial imaginary by advocating the active voice required in spread design. This is a course in poetic ritual structures. We will craft careful attention to shape of language, for the way we word the questions we offer to the oracle is in itself a divination.
Further, this course is an ongoing iterative practice, with the first round archived for new students. This means you get 12 prerecorded classes alongside 6 live workshops, making for a comprehensive education in the poetics of divinatory spread design.
Lets map new worlds together darling reader.
x,
Christopher
