MAP Office is conducting a residency at AAA from February to July 2012. As part of their residency, the artist/architect duo is creating an atlas of real and imaginary places found in the Archive, a unique visual cartography in which combinations of text and image dissolve the conventional borders of Asia. The atlas is about artists and the territories they invent, use, appropriate, and transform. It is a new categorisation of Asia, in the same way that Jose Luis Borges refers to an ancient Chinese encyclopædia entitled 'Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.'  The atlas becomes a cataloguing system in which the territory of Asia Art Archive defines its own physical and mental contours. The various territories are classified by constructing heterotopian platforms based on productive processes - first the physical place of the Archive (spatial dimension); its content extended to an artistic narrative (artistic practice); and finally the temporal accumulation of the Archive (cultural strategy). In continuity with their current practice, Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix are here attracted by territorial concerns, walking the line between art and architecture, aesthetics and activism, image and text.

MAP Office will present an installation within the Archive from August to September 2012.

About MAP Office

MAP Office is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (b. 1966, Casablanca, Morocco) and Valérie Portefaix (b. 1969, Saint-Étienne, France). The duo of artists/architects has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression including drawing, photography, video, installation, performance, and literary and theoretical texts. Their work critiques spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space. They use humor, games, and fiction as part of their approach, and often produce publications that disseminate their work.