Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment

Spring 2023 || Spatial Storytelling

Cüirtopia

with

Regner Ramos, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras

and

Mary Pena, Princeton-Mellon / Princeton Program in Latin American Studies Fellow

This is a hybrid event. Attend in person at the School of Architecture (lunch boxes available while supplies last), or register for the Zoom webinar:

https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gGO4PLd7QKG9Qz53T7UnRg

“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. As such, “Cüirtopia” aims to insert LGBTQ+ spaces into Puerto Rico’s architectural history, cultural landscape, urban memory, and political future. 

The Spring 2023 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Program in Latin American Studies, Center for Collaborative History, Departments of Art & Archaeology and English, HMEI, PIIRS, SPIA, and the School of Architecture.

Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Boxed lunches are available while supplies last.