Sea Currents and Archipelagic Thinking in Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ Queer Abstract Experimentation

Abstract

Nayda Collazo-Llorens is a recognized Puerto Rican artist whose works have been included in several art collections in Puerto Rico and the US. Even if already commented on, her oeuvre warrants and deserves a more in-depth study that pays attention to her conceptu- al operations and experimentation. Inspired by the artist’s reflection on the archipelago, this article is a product of my ongoing research on her body of work. I identify and discuss two sea currents that run across, nurture, and guide the artist’s queer relational abstraction between the years 2008 and 2020, and the formal, contextual, and conceptual exploration and operations with the triangle and grid as conceptual devices for queering cartography. I propose that it is an abstraction and queering that simplifies, mixes, complicates, fragments, interferes, expands, drags, invaginates, multiplies, and deploys an architectonic multi-folding, enacting an archipelagic epistemology to account for the changing territories of diasporic life and a decolonial cartography of navigation.