New Media

  • Coloso: A Factory of Queer, Digital Monuments for Puerto Rico
  • GRANTEE
    Regner Ramos & Kleanthis Kyriakou
    GRANT YEAR
    2021

“Loverbar,” 2020. Digital photo. Courtesy José Néstor Rodríguez

This project is a web-based, virtual factory that produces digital monuments commemorating closed LGBTQ+ spaces and buildings in San Juan, Puerto Rico from the 1960s to the present. Advocating for the inclusion of queer spaces within the island’s architectural heritage, Coloso inserts the buildings that are significant to the LGBTQ+ community into the island’s architectural history, its cultural infrastructure, urban memory, and political future. The website performs as both a queer archive and an architectural research method. It enables user-generated content to materialize—using a unique kit of parts—into a digital monument which can be downloaded, screenshot, shared, laser-cut and/or 3D-printed. Coloso aims to explore digital and analogue, coding and making, process and play, and immateriality and permanence as queer, decolonial modes of conducting architectural research.

Regner Ramos holds a doctorate in architecture from The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He has taught at Central Saint Martins, London College of Communication, University of Hertfordshire, and Queen Mary University of London. Ramos is associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture, where he teaches architectural design, architectural theory, and supervises MArch dissertations. He is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal informa, the architecture editor at Glass Magazine, and coeditor of his book Queer Sites in Global Context: Technologies, Spaces, and Otherness (Routledge, 2020). His research focuses on the relationship between queer identity, digital technologies, and built environment through model-making, drawing, and site-specific events. Ramos is a two-time FIPI Grantee, including his 2020-22 project: Cüirtopia. Ramos is from the island of Puerto Rico.

Kleanthis Kyriakou holds a master's in architecture from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, in London. His thesis project “House of Extravaganza” presented a speculative proposition for a new queer Utopia in London that is rooted in forgotten architectural queer histories. The project has been nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architectsa (RIBA) Silver Medal Award, won the Deans Collection Award, as well as the Spatial Practices Award for Cultural Equity. In parallel with his studies, Kyriakou performs as Divine the Third—his drag alter ego—and conducts digital and physical performances that advocate for LGBTQ+ rights to the city. Divine’s experiments, shifting queer identity and space, are documented and shared online at myqueerlondon.com, a repository of Kleanthis’s and Divine’s work over the last two years. Kyriakou is from the island of Cyprus.