Valérie Portefaix

Valérie Portefaix (France/Hong Kong) is Director of MAP Office, a multidisciplinary platform based in Hong Kong since 1996, co-founded with Laurent Gutierrez. The relation between bodies and territories is at the centre of its research-based artistic production. With 20 years of multifaceted navigations, publications, and exhibitions, MAP Office’s practice has evolved across multiple fields and disciplines, having recently developed a specific focus on islands and other liquid territories as a subject and object of study. Through these investigations, and after more than a decade of exploring the effects of globalisation and urbanisation in Hong Kong and China, MAP Office is investigating a new geography of archipelagos that characterise the transient and globalised environment of the Anthropocene age. MAP Office’s last cross-disciplinary research Our Ocean Guide was published in 2017 by Lightbox.