Queer Space/Protest Architecture

How can temporary architecture catalyse social change by enabling public dialogue, activism and resistance—particularly amid rising hostility and criminalisation of Indonesia’s queer community? How can the coded heteronormativity in our built environment be challenged? How can queer space, the term long associated with individual identity, function as protest architecture that destabilises the constituted norms, reclaims public space and amplifies marginalised voices in the public and political realm?

The project proposes a temporary architectural intervention in Taman Fatahillah, Jakarta, transforming the colonial-era square into a site of protest and public activation. By challenging rigid spatial hierarchies, the design destabilises centralised power dynamics through ephemeral, mobile and performative structures. These interventions construct counter-narratives to institutional and queerphobic authority, reclaiming the square as a space of inclusion, visibility and resistance. With a rhizomatic spatial strategy, the project replaces the square’s order with a decentralised network of interactive structures. Scaffolding, inflatables, tripods, shipping containers and translucent nightclub enclosures disrupt conventional spatial relations while symbolising moments of queerness and resistance. The nightclub—historically significant for queer communities in Kota Tua—is recontextualised within the square’s inner zone, boldly asserting queer presence in public space. Public programs—including food market, exhibitions and forums—activate the outer, more publicly accessible areas, fostering dialogue and communal participation. Queer space functions as protest architecture by refusing erasure and subverting heteronormative urban norms. Drawing from protest camps and queer spaces as acts of occupation and demonstration, the intervention asserts presence through collective visibility, reconfiguring public space as a site of resistance. By leveraging temporality as a tool for empowerment, the project resists co-optation, ensuring its integrity as a space for marginalised voices. Designed for a brief yet impactful duration, it queers the square by disrupting the architecture that defines exclusion, foregrounding the agency of queer bodies in the cityscape.