Map Office
By Caroline Ha Thuc / For more than 20 years, Valérie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez, known together as Map Office, have been working in the field of art and architecture with a rhizomatic approach, exploring both the reality and the mythology of territories. They represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and and won the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2013. Caroline Ha Thuc: For this Venice Biennial, you are presenting an exhibition, seminar and book launch about the deep sea, working with both artists and others whose work involves the ocean, who write about their relationship with it. What triggered this idea? Map Office: Our project in Venice has to be seen as a meeting platform around the theme of the ocean. An Ocean Archive is the title of the exhibition, and of our research at large on oceans and islands, implemented last year during Art Basel within the Open Platform programme at the Asia Art Archive. Along with the exhibition, we are launching the first part of the archive as Our Ocean …