Mellon Forum: Cüirtopia

“Cüirtopia” is a Caribbean mapping project of LGBTQ buildings and territories, by Dr. Regner Ramos at the University of Puerto Rico. By playing with fact and fiction; history and storytelling; legitimacy and conspiracy; documentation and blunders, “Cüirtopia” reimagines how Caribbean territories, spaces, and buildings can be represented, through a postcolonial, queer lens. The project exists across a series of sites and platforms: a web-based interactive map of LGBTQ+ spaces in Puerto Rico; a show and podcast in Radio Universidad; architecture courses at the Universidad de Puerto Rico; a film at the MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome; a fictional story published on Instagram in real-time; and an exhibition at the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art. By acknowledging the role of maps in processes of colonization, the project looks to archipelagic thinking, queer methods of documenting architecture, and boundary-pushing cartographic representations to bring their untold queer architectural histories to light.