Insights: MAP Office
First piece of a series of interviews led during our stay in Hong Kong, we talked with Valérie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez, founders of MAP Office, about their practice in Asia and the maps as revealers of invisible realities.
Please can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more your background?
Valérie Portefaix:
My name is Valérie Portefaix, a French trained as an artist first and then, architect, based in Hong Kong for 20 years.
Laurent Gutierrez:
I am Laurent Gutierrez, I am also an architect, first trained as an engineer. I am teaching at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and sharing my practice with Valérie under the name of MAP Office. I have just finished a PhD on the topic of territories and transdisciplinarity. It investigates how we could redefine today’s new forms of territories and their characteristics.
Why having chosen Hong Kong to start your practice?
V.P.:
We arrived in Hong Kong in 1995. We cannot say it has changed our careers as we just graduated at the time. Indeed, one month after our graduation, we were in the plane with a container following us, our first child arriving. It was a fresh start in this city, for us, young architects.
We came with a teaching position at the Chinese universities. The Department of Architecture was really new at this time, Laurent having a full-time position and me having a project as a short-term research assistant.
We arrived with the perspective of working in an academic context which was, from the beginning, our intentions. We studied architecture to, first, do research about what we called the urban phenomena. Eventually, all these research projects led us into the art and design fields.
L.G.:
Actually, 1995 also represents the second take off of China. Hong Kong was full of energy and coming from Europe, it seemed that everything was possible. Among these possible things, starting a practice here. So, we decided to give it a try and to develop our activities here instead of in Europe.
V.P.:
It was really a question of opportunity for us. At that time, when we arrived in Hong Kong, we were not experts of China at all. We landed here by chance and started to learn. This transition was important for us as architects since we could observe all the Chinese cities exploding, multiplying their population by four in ten years. In comparison to China, Hong Kong was living a period of crisis that was something new for them, with a financial crisis first in 1998 and a political one in 1997. It has been very interesting to be here. For our first fifteen years all our practice was focusing in Hong Kong and China, starting to reflect on urban changes.
Did this city change your practice or did it literally build your practice?
V.P.:
We built our practice following these movements to accompany the growing transitions we were observing. I guess, at some point, we got lucky as we applied to various platforms to support our research and we quickly got positive feedback. We started with Mapping HK, a project invited to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2000. It was a fantastic opportunity, as we were young researchers. It was followed by the Rotterdam Biennale in 2003 who commissioned us the study of a highway between Shenzhen and Guangzhou for one year. Then, more opportunities came after that.
L.G.:
We were starting research based on the opportunities to exhibit. Very quickly we understood that the ideas of exhibiting, in one hand, and communicating our work, in the other hand, are very different. We started with publications, as we established our publishing house MAP Book Publishers, being diffused worldwide. Moving from books to exhibitions format was another step. Slowly our practice transformed from doing urban research and architecture in a conventional sense to a more and more artistic practice. This transition happened around 2005 and then, ten years after, this kind of practice keeps evolving from studying the urban context and imagining research tools to artistic concepts and exhibitions.
Regarding your works on cartography, what would be your definition of a map?
L.G.:
A map? It depends on which map you are talking about! A map is an old tool to evaluate or to represent a context. Has it to be accurate? Has it to be fictional? It really depends on the cartographer. Our relation to maps follows a particular perspective. What we see on a map is what we want to project in it. This is a very organic relation. It is true that we name ourselves MAP Office, and maybe at the beginning it was more unconscious, but now it is becoming conscious as we go along.
V.P.:
It took us a long time to see that. Now, maps we do now are very different from the one we used to do also in early 2000s. We were commissioned for a project about Shenzhen for a Biennale where each city had to produce a map. Major cities, such as Los Angeles, already has maps. However, in the region of Hong Kong, government was starting to build the whole infrastructure. We had to change our map on a monthly basis as they were constantly changing the territory.
Are those concerns of representing the territory related to your approach of temporality?
V.P.:
We understood time matters even more than space itself. As the use of these spaces varies in time, the city can take another dimension in a few years. In Hong Kong, we captured it in a very different way we could have done it in Europe. You can imagine that living in Hong Kong, the first question is how can you settle in such density? However, if you look closer, you can actually escape the city and be in the jungle in less than ten minutes. It is this combination that makes Hong Kong so unique.
However, the density is nothing compared to the intensity and even temporal density of the city itself. It is where new scenarios and ways of planning a system also become unique.
So the uniqueness of Hong Kong is fuelling your vision of space and time?
V.P.:
Always. It is very strange, as the more we stay, the less we know it. The territory seems to keep becoming bigger. We started three years ago to work on a project called Invisible Islands; Hong Kong being surrounded by more than 240 islands and no one in the city being able to name ten of them.
We started to explore 33 specific islands that were used in various ways during the last centuries. Each one of these islands has specific components and started to tell us another history going beyond colonization era. As it happened, a lot of them also have Neolithic sites, completely changing our perspective about time and the occupation of lands in Hong Kong. It puts a different perspective on the claim that before us there was nobody as part of the conventional colonial discourse.
Exploring those islands takes us forever. We still have two to reach and none of them had public access. We had to play around with the borders, with the rules, to sometimes swim to reach the land. Every single island is an expedition. We keep exploring this small territory having its own geography, with specificities such as rock formations.
L.G.:
If these islands are well positioned on a map, they still have a high level of invisibility. They are interesting because they have a lot of stories to tell. Some are used for drug addicts centre, or nuclear waste storage, police training ground, refugees’ camp… and nobody knows about it.
Regarding your last works, do you envisage a critical approach in your work related to space issues?
L.G.:
Our approach is not so much oriented on the space issues, but rather on the policy of developing spaces.
We are investigating the public space, with matters such how space is now appropriated, especially through a notion commonly used at the moment: the POPS (Privately Owned Public Space). Even before POPS, we were already questioning how private entities that are monopolizing public space for profits. We were also interested in looking at the opposite, on how the public could subvert space, which is per se a critique.
We engaged with what has been coined as tactical urbanism. In Hong Kong, we looked at various opportunities. For example, we carried a project for the MoMA (Museum Of Modern Arts, New York City) which was a perspective on Occupy Movements.
We were recording what was then happening during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, same has Parallel Labs did. In our case, we shot a film showing the issues or design paradoxes that existed in these systems of conflict and the tactical approach of the movement.
Which kind of engagement are you seeking when you reach to the public through your installations or artworks?
L.G.:
We want to reach them at various levels. When you exhibit in museums such as MoMA, you have obviously the specialists coming, knowing exactly what they are looking for. The ones who are going to take notes and to criticize the works. The 1%. We have still the 99% to satisfy as well.
Among these 99%, a lot of them are kids, parents and tourists who don’t know anything about the issues we are highlighting. They will stand on an average of ten seconds in front of our work. So how do you communicate with them? What do you communicate to them? So, we use drawings and magic tricks.
V.P.:
It is maybe because we have children, but we are focusing on drawings with elements that only the young ones will see. As soon they spotted them, they will start to engage with the work and look for other details. Eventually, they will call their parents.
Regarding the choice of the drawings, for quite some time, we did a lot of photography and we tend to do less now. Mainly because with a photo everyone sees something different. With drawings, it works as a form of writing that removes most of the often negative impact of the photos. For example, what we did for a project following the construction of a highway in China was, for us, a very positive way to speak about the process of urbanizing and about the invisible zones existing underneath.
When we showed the images of the project in Europe, everybody was thinking negatively about the situations depicted, with prejudices, and we got tired of it. The drawings remove this misunderstanding and only exacerbate the positive scenarios. It then becomes more playful. The fiction in the drawing can have a very active role in the project.
As we are talking about the subjectiveness of a piece of work and its possible misunderstanding, how your personal beliefs and values are translated in your process of mapping realities?
L.G.:
Our political concern is clearly oriented towards communities in need. In two weeks, we will start a project will local refugees in Hong Kong. This is the type of sensitivity we have.
For almost ten years, we have followed migrant workers in China to see how they work, how they live, but always in a positive approach, taking care not to stigmatize them. We were rather interested in showing beautiful things happening there.
One of our key drivers is to make visible the invisible such as what we called the shadow communities. Our early drawings were trying to reveal the invisible people working in China such as the doorman or the tea lady. We envisaged it as colouring pages for children: “colour the invisible public”. Basically, building on the analogy, by putting colours, it was suddenly about making them visible. Their identity was revealed.
With now almost 10 000 refugees from Africa and Middle East having entered on the territory of Hong Kong the last three years, still no one is talking about it, not as in Europe. Regarding this, our engagement will not necessarily be an artwork, but try to design an intervention or an event giving these refugees a form of visibility.
V.P.:
A lot of our work is about revealing: revealing the invisibility of the islands, revealing the invisibility of migrant workers, and revealing the invisibility of the underneath. Basically, we seek to reveal what you don’t see from Google Earth, the non-generic.
We are even more curious about what makes those things not being visible. We pushed this idea with the project Bloody Haze, a sculpture in Kowloon looking at the skyline of Hong Kong. This is like binoculars that make things looking to be closer and others looking to further. It is revealing this strange relation between China and Hong Kong. This is why, I think, there is a lot of political commentary in our work.
If we talk about multidisciplinarity, how do you feel it is feeding your approach or shaping your work?
L.G.:
What motivates us is the curiosity about how to define the world we are living in. For the last seven years, we have been working on the islands, these liquid territories. This is because we believe that some of the future issues faced by the world will eventually revolve around the challenges now face by islands. This curiosity for what is happening and what could happen drives us to understand the system and its logic.
Architecture, as a discipline, is the ability to define the project as a mode of operation. We use this method as an engagement for society, to understand the world surrounding us.
V.P.:
Our interest in multidisciplinarity is also strongly related to the education we got as architects. Having studied architecture is mandatory to explore the logic of these territories.
When you study architecture, you are reaching out to all the other domains and expertise around you which are literally building the world. For us, multidisciplinarity is really about absorbing, reflecting and projecting.
What are the next steps or projects you want to push with MAP Office?
L.G.:
One of our major concerns of the moment is articulated around the Anthropocene and how we communicate about this emerging notion. This is still following our intention to make complex realities more visible. The biggest problematic is to know how the questions revealed through our work on the islands could echo other political questions.
At same time, we are also affected by recent human migrations such as refugee movements. We are now trying to work on how to connect these two issues and see how they might complete each other.
One of our thoughts regarding this is that land in general are private properties, but surface water is still a public space. This is part of our efforts to question the notion of Commons and the issues around it.
V.P.:
Crossing the islands, the refugees and the question of the Commons, we are interested in seeing how all of this could be translated in terms of camps. Our research could tend to compare the dry and rudimentary setups of current refugee places with all the floating communities existing in Asia. The latest are communities living as sea gypsies outside the land. For hundreds of years, they have been sustaining themselves on the seas, with seaweed as a form of food, for example.
As for our previous works, we are trying to find positive stories coming from seas, about how people are living decently on water. It is a possible future to explore to address to the similar concerns observed with the refugees.
