Making Cüirtopia

Summer calls for beaches and island getaways, but last Saturday in San Juan, Puerto Rico, there were islands in the making. As part of his exhibition Cüirtopia: Soft Crash, now open at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Regner Ramos invited the public to envision queer utopias in a future-Caribbean free from imposed gender norms. Ramos, who teaches at University of Puerto Rico’s architecture school, kicked off the afternoon with a guided tour of the exhibition, which continues his work of mapping queer spaces in San Juan and throughout the Caribbean at large. “There is a fragmentation of queer cultures in the Caribbean that have been split into territories with borders determined by their colonization,” he said, adding that vestiges of colonialism divide the region’s LGBTQ+ communities. “We’re all one region, yet we struggle to keep up with what our queer neighbors are doing.”

Following the tour, Ramos launched into a workshop outside the museum. Participants were given a kit of parts to complete their models—fragments of small islands that came together to form an ar…