MAP OFFICE is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (Casablanca, 1966) and Valérie Portefaix (Saint-Etienne, 1969). This 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, photographs, video, installations, performance and literary and theoretical texts. Their entire project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space.

Laurent Gutierrez is an Associate Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he leads the Environment and Interior Design discipline and the Master of Strategic Design as well as the Master in Urban Environments Design. He is also the co-director of SD SPACE LAB. He is currently doing a PhD on the “Processes of Modernization and Urbanization in China focusing on the Pearl River Delta region”.

Valérie Portefaix is the principal of MAP OFFICE. She received her Master of Architecture degree from School of Architecture Paris-Belleville and a PhD in Urbanism from University Pierre Mendes France. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Produced in response to the open call to reflect on possible routes from Jerusalem and Berlin to Venice for the Utopia Station project of the 2003 Venice Biennale, Viral Operation seizes upon the figurations of unintentional biological threat and the maintenance of the state and body by experimenting with the devolution of borders within the potentially utopian platform of continental Europe. Presented as a short video, the project follows MAP Office as they arrive in Berlin via the Hong Kong International Airport wearing the surgical masks that are considered, at least in greater China, a social nicety more than anything threatening. During the time of SARS, however, this appearance coupled with their point of origin made them a potential contaminant to the geographic health of the region; leaving the airport, they are accompanied by armed security guards.

Runscape is a film that depicts two young men sprinting through the public spaces of Hong Kong, almost invariably via the visual mode of the long shot, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze to the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory or at least trajectory described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun. A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space. In this action, invisible facades are constructed across a grid that spans the area between the codified signs of polished facades, an open-ended and performative notion of being-in-transit.

[Robin Peckham]

In 1996, when Jean Baudrillard first published “The Conspiracy of Art” he scandalized the international art community by declaring that contemporary art had no more reason to exist. The question of aesthetic banality and retreat from issues of public life and “the real” are questions that have plagued the art world for centuries, from the very first copied Renoir apple to Tino Sehgal or Sophie Calle experiences that anthropologically mix aesthetics, art and life. Baudrillard has since become interested in the simulations of reality set forth by film and vice versa.

In film, the work of simulation becomes drama, a comparative drama that seeks to simulate reality. Runscape is used to knit together the geography of Hong Kong, a cartography that trades on the idea of mapping by running through the streets (a young man is seen pounding / racing through the streets purposefully, in stark contrast to the plethora of crowds that are slowly inching forward along the traffic jammed pavement of Causeway Bay.) The runner dodges past pedestrians, runs diagonally through meticulously urban planned plazas, up flights of stairs and through the shopping malls of Hong Kong in order to appropriate the city on his own terms. The direction of his sprint, the contour of his cityscape is directed by his own desires, a remapping of cartography that allows him to remake the city in his own image. In Runscape, the idea is that a single individual can remap the cartography of the city, to redefine the city on each individual’s terms, to make each city mapping unique to each individual rather than a grouping of concepts, random census tracts, defunct neighborhoods and property blocks. The runner is at times cooperating with the city, in running along the stairs and sidewalks that are mandated, at other times, he jumps over unsuspecting walls and leaps over fences, pitting the city as an adversary, a challenge to his movement, testing the limitations of the concrete jungle as it slowly comes alive with the unorthodox use of its cityscape.

Political and cultural boundaries collapse as the figure jumps over districts in Causeway Bay, Central, and Aberdeen. The runner stitches a new type of geographical exploration that reimagines the terrain on a new mapped media. References and location systems zip by a sprinting figure in a rapidly moving short film where motion, major landmarks and assorted cultural topography become simply a simulation, simulacra of importance. Runscape is about the seduction of film as moving photography, images of Hong Kong flash by us in blinding images knit together only by the running figure as he races across the entire city.