Cüirtopia is an interactive map and a research project on Puerto Rico's queer spaces. It rethinks queer architectural and urban history and representation through cartography and storytelling, with a specific focus on the unique context of the Caribbeans. Cüirtopia also challenges architectural canons through its original dissemination of architectural research which includes virtual mapping, fictional characters, curation, civic engagement and much more. We discussed this multilayered project with its creator, the Puerto Rican architect Regner Ramos. In this interview Ramos guides us through Cüirtopia clarifying its playful, experimental but also critical foundations.
Screenshot of the Cüirtopia map, by Regner Ramos (2022).
KOOZ We would like to start with a few general questions: what is Cuïrtopia and why did you decide to develop this project?
REGNER RAMOS Cüirtopia is an architectural mapping project looking to reimagine the way we document, register, and represent LGBTQ buildings in the Caribbean. It’s a really multi-layered project in the sense that although it centers on queer spaces, it exists through various mediums and platforms: a radio show/podcast, elective courses at the University of Puerto Rico, site-specific events and installations, a web-based map, and exhibitions at different museums.
Queer spaces are unimportant to most architects and architectural historians here, because they don’t meet certain criteria that makes them “valuable”. But these buildings make up the landscape of queer history in the island.
When I returned to Puerto Rico after finishing my PhD in London, I was surprised by how little research exists into the spaces and buildings that make up queer history in the island. Architectural discourse in the island has entirely ignored these kinds of spaces. I always say that queer spaces are unimportant to most architects and architectural historians here, because they don’t meet certain criteria that makes them “valuable”. For instance, they’re not made by celebrated architects, they’re not iconic buildings, and also, they’re not necessarily “beautiful” buildings; they’re informal, at-times ad-hoc spaces by minorities for minorities, not be architects designing for a client with a juicy budget. But these buildings make up the landscape of queer history in the island. They lie on the outskirts of traditional academic research, and even though that presents challenges, it also gives me a lot of room to play, to reimagine how they can be theorized upon, through alternate methodologies that ultimately insert them within serious architectural discourse.
In Puerto Rico, queer spaces open and close in the blink of an eye. Furthermore, some spaces are only used for queer events on particular moments and for ephemeral events. I realized that when I drew the maps on AutoCAD some years ago, as soon as they were plotted, they became outdated because some new space had opened or a current space had shut down. The digital Cüirtopia map is my attempt to account for the ephemerality of these places, while being able to give people the chance of marking them themselves, as new ones open.
KOOZ In the project’s website you introduced “Konpa”. What role does this avatar play? Why did you choose to introduce a digital character in Cuïrtopia?
RR Konpa means “compass” in Haitian creole. When I was thinking about the Cüirtopia web map, I was trying to find ways where I could use the map as a research tool, where people could input information onto it. But I didn’t want it to feel like a research survey, I wanted the map to feel friendly, I wanted it to feel interactive. Konpa is a digital character that comes to life when users click on the map. It starts asking visitors questions, but it does so with a sense of humor. Konpa is sassy! I was inspired by my first interactions with the internet, with those 2000s chat bots, and by 90s RPG games like Zelda and Pokemon, where you interacted with characters who performed a script in a text box. So in essence, Konpa is gathering information from users but it’s doing so in a way where people don’t feel like they’re doing a traditional academic survey. I hope people feel like they’re playing.
I’m vouching for storytelling as a research method that helps us construct a kind of architectural history of the LGBTQ community here.
KOOZ What role does storytelling play in your research?
RR Islands and maps are so heavily charged, historically, with storytelling, with speculation, fiction, lies, exaggeration, myths, and blunders. The more I researched mapping practices, the more I realized how playful early maps were centuries ago and how many stories surrounded islands, specifically, on maps. I wanted to include this within the Cüirtopia map and project overall: it is a rescuing of oral histories and pairing them with mapping practices; I wanted to add a humane layer that’s gotten wiped out of contemporary mapping softwares that comes with GPS and GIS technologies. So when we think of how islands on maps were historically, often-times, acts of storytelling (in some cases fiction), and when I think about the scarcity of architectural documentation for queer spaces in the island of Puerto Rico, I’m vouching for storytelling as a research method that helps us construct a kind of architectural history of the LGBTQ community here.
KOOZ It would be great if you could expand a bit more on this last point. What is the relationship between queer mapping and archiving and speculative, digital (GIS) research methods in your work? What emerges from the intersection between real and unreal, between built and un-built?
RR Up until recently it was illegal to be queer in the island. A lot of being queer entailed not registering buildings but, rather, maintaining discretion and secrecy. To be able to construct a spatial queer history, we need to have conversations, which no doubt will be full of inaccuracies, speculations, and contradictions, much like the stories that surrounded maps centuries ago, but for me that is very true to the nature of queerness itself. We’ve bought into the idea that maps are intended to be rational, objective, true representations of space, when in reality this is a very recent idea that’s probably gained popularity because of the easy access we have to satellite technologies. I was interested in using satellite technologies to contest maps as artifacts of truth.
To be able to construct a spatial queer history, we need to have conversations, which no doubt will be full of inaccuracies, speculations, and contradictions, but for me that is very true to the nature of queerness itself.
I always say that queerness is useful as a tool to undefine norms, to challenge conventions, to break boundaries of what we believe to be fixed and true. I also think that traditional research methods are in part responsible for why a queer architectural history in the island has been ignored for so long, and if I just follow protocol for this traditional form of research, it would lead me nowhere. We need to find alternate, culturally-specific ways to include, not just queer people, but entire populations, groups, and minorities which have been marginalized, ignored, silenced, or deemed irrelevant by Western academic discourse.
So to answer your second question, I think that at the intersection between the real and the unreal lies possibilities… limitless possibilities, methodologies, projects, and outputs, as well as new ways of connection, building kinship and community, with diverse people coming from different walks of life, ages, identities, and experiences.
KOOZ These reflections lead to this next question: to what extent does Cuïrtopia, or your recent exhibition “Cüirtopia: Soft Crash”, move beyond current architectural and urban research methods and histories?
RR While we were building the map I was writing a fictional story, publishing short chapters on our Instagram account. It is the story of a group of migrants that leave their homeland on a sailboat and two floating ships in search of a supposed archipelago called Cüirtopia, where people were rumored to be free of imposed norms of sexuality and gender. Their navigation software was operated by this digital companion, Konpa, who ultimately tells them how to get to Cüirtopia, helps them map the territories they visited on the way there, and gives them the coordinates on where to land: the Puerto Rico Museum of Contempory Art–a 20th century Georgian building located in what’s been historically the queerest neighborhood in the entire island. That’s where the “Cüirtopia: Soft Crash” exhibition has been on view since February 2022.
Cüirtopia confronts architectural discourse by repurposing and queering the traditional formal languages of architectural documentation, representation and design.
Cüirtopia confronts architectural discourse by repurposing and queering the traditional formal languages of architectural documentation, representation and design. The MAC’s physical location in relation to a queer, urban circuit in Santurce positions the building as an alternate space for queer modes of spatial appropriation, cultural production, and artistic imagination. Rather than using this building as an empty backdrop for the project, “Cüirtopia: Soft Crash” writes the MAC into its very story, through my interpretation of Jane Rendell’s research practice called “site-writing”. In this way, the MAC is conceived here as a vital agent in the Cüirtopia project itself: a co-conspirator whose very materiality and history is activated, challenged and queered.
We’ve had a series of tours, art, performance and design-based events for the LGBTQ community to take over the building (MAC) and the Santurce neighborhood since then, so the exhibition is really a living project, inviting people to come see it, but also to add on to it, layering other forms of making onto the gallery, the MAC’s interior courtyard, and it’s gate. It’s been really rewarding for me to see that this fictional story of queer people coming to the island to live while claiming a space and eventually acquiring visibility in the area, has not just been a project of fiction, but that it’s actually come to life with the local queer community: through the massive vogue ball we had on the opening night of the show (in collaboration with local group LaBoriVogue), through the silk-screen flags we installed on the gate, and through the walking tour of the neighborhood where we visited different LGBTQ venues, past and present. These are all my ways of contributing to architectural and urban history.
I would like for people to imagine culturally and geographically specific ways of carrying out research, methods that ring true to their locations, not what Western discourse has deemed to be an appropriate, “objective” strategy.
KOOZ What are the major future implications of Cüirtopia in your opinion?
RR I think there’s a lot of value in having the very first map of LGBTQ spaces in Puerto Rico. However, I also don’t think that this is the only way to do it. Part of my ambition is that, just as I was inspired by other queer artists and thinkers – like Lucas La Rochelle and their “Queering the Map” – my Cüirtopia will give people more ideas to create their own projects. There’s more value in multiple initiatives led by groups of people than there is in thinking that there’s one way to do things. I would hope that for those who see Cüirtopia, they’re able to find their own ways of approaching queer spatial discourse, politics and history. I would like for people to, as I said before, imagine culturally and geographically specific ways of carrying out research, methods that ring true to their locations, not what Western discourse has deemed to be an appropriate, “objective” strategy.
KOOZ We found your communication strategy of Cüirtopia particularly interesting as it seems to move beyond the usual channels used by architects. Can you briefly tell us a bit about themand tell us what it means to you to make architectural research accessible to the general public?
RR As part of my tenure probation at the University of Puerto Rico, I’ve had to go through the motions of writing chapters for academic books and research articles for journals, submitting abstracts for international conferences, etc. I’m not sure that publishing a peer-reviewed research paper in a journal is necessarily a format that aligns with the construction of queer intellectual production in an island like Puerto Rico. This idea of gatekeeping of knowledge, of verifying validity by anonymous intellectuals from random parts of the world, to certify that a research piece meets certain Western, white standards is something I’m not necessarily interested in participating in anymore. At the end of the day, that knowledge is written in a lingo accessible only to few and, unless the publication is open-sourced, it comes with a cost. The more I engage with queer communities in the island, the wider I see the gap between academic traditions and real, lived reality here.
The goal with my work is for the people here, for my community, to have resources, to carve spaces for them, to hear their stories, give them a sense of belonging in an island which for so long has attempted to make them/us invisible.
The project has been very active on Instagram, a popular tool for queer people that I use it to find my audience. There are other formats just as important though. For instance, I have an upcoming book chapter where I wrote a little bit about how my radio show, Cüirtopia Live, is a form of intellectual production that rings true to Puerto Rico. In each radio show (also available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify), I interview someone new about a particular building or space which has been significant to the LGBTQ community here. Again, we come back to the idea of oral information, of storytelling as a form of creating an architectural register of queer places. It’s such a different forum and experience than a conference setting, for instance. It’s less intimidating for the people I bring to my show, it places them at the forefront of telling their stories instead of me interpreting them and rewriting them in my words, it also feels more horizontal, where the researcher/subject divide fades away. It’s about talking to people. The goal with my work isn’t to have a prestigious scholar tell me that my research is valid, I don’t care about that; it’s for the people here, for my community, to have resources, to bring them in to institutions, to carve spaces for them, to represent them, to give them visibility, to hear their stories, repeat their stories, give them tools for expression, access to information, and a sense of belonging in an island which for so long has attempted to make them/us invisible.
KOOZ To go back to the focus of our platform: What is, in your opinion, the potential of the un-built in queer urban and architectural research and design practices?
RR I can circle back to my strategy with Cüirtopia, particularly in the fictional aspect of the story and the way that it unfolds in the gallery of the MAC: short films showing factual data with captions showing a fictional script; 3D pieces showcasing imagined territories; reprints of the MAC’s original blueprints from the 1900s; video clips of structural drawings of the building’s glass and steel space frame; fictional maps drawn meticulously on AutoCAD. The tense contrast between archival documents and a fictional tale told through imagined maps and fake islands, as well as the traditional architectural technologies/materials that are pushed to the limits to create the project—AutoCAD, Rhino, CNC milling, 3D printing, etc—push the boundaries of how architectural research is carried out, vouching for new, radical, and particularly queer methods within architectural discourse. The tension between the factual details of the building’s materiality, and the speculative journey to crash through it seek to create disruptive ways of inserting queer stories within architectural history in Puerto Rico. In this way, the exhibition/project confronts architectural discourse and the island’s politics of space with being responsible for erasing queer, marginated, and non-normative bodies and identities from within our spatio-cultural history.
Bio
Regner Ramos, Ph.D. obtained his Masters in Architecture from the University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture. In addition, he holds a PhD in Architecture from The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL). Since 2016, Ramos has been conducting research into the LGBTQ+ community in the island, searching for ways to include queer spaces into the landscape of contemporary Puerto Rican architectural discourse. Across his different projects, Ramos’s design-based research practice unfolds through a variety of methods: performative writing, narration, drawings, video/film, and making. Ramos is a tenured Associate Professor at the UPR School of Architecture. His research project “Cüirtopia: Mapping a Cultural Memory and Architectural Register of Queer Spaces in Puerto Rico” is funded by theFIPI Award, and his first book, co-edited with Sharif Mowlabocus is called Queer Sites in Global Contexts (Routledge, 2020). With his partner Kleanthis Kyriakou, he co-directs their architectural practice Wet-Hard Agency, recently supported by the Graham Foundation for their project, "Coloso: A Factory of Queer, Digital Monuments".
Francesca Romana Forlini is an architect, Ph.D, editor, writer and educator whose research is located at the intersection of feminism, cultural sociology and architectural history and theory. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology and Parsons The New School in New York. She worked as chief editor at KoozArch, where she is currently a contributor. She is a Fulbrighter ed alumna of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the RCA.
