MAP Office

“No man is an island,” wrote John Donne in 1624. Nearly four hundred years later, the cultural mythos of islands remains a powerful lure, provoking ongoing separatist propositions for individual subjects and collectives. Wrapped in contradiction and paradox, these dreams of escape and yearnings for a different life, channeled through an essay by Gilles Deleuze, form the foundation of the project “Desert Islands” (all works 2009) by the Hong Kong–based collective MAP Office (Valerie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez).

Featuring three videos, a central seating/viewing platform titled Domesticated Island, and a grid of one hundred mirrored acrylic panels, each with the outline of a specific island or chain of islands including Okinawa, Grenada, and the Florida Keys, laser-etched across the surface, the installation is deceptively light as it touches on such topics as global warming, forced migration, nuclear testing, ecotourism, Somali piracy, tax shelters, gun running, drug dealing, colonialism, tsunami devastation, and the complicated history of utopia. Indeed, the idea of utopia and its association with islands, from Thomas More to Dubai’s man-made the World, becomes the inescapable vortex at the center of the project. As evidenced in the numerous film clips that make up the three-channel video Island Resort, the social situations that develop on islands are effective control groups, offering rare insights into the conflicted engagement of the individual with society. And all too often, the drama of utopian aspirations concludes with the return of civilization, its barbarism intact: Robinson Crusoe’s capitalist imperative and Piggy’s brutal murder are just two examples. Ironically, and despite the antics of Johnny Depp, it was the pirates who created the most successful utopias: communities free of government, economic hierarchies, and mandatory labor in Madagascar, the Bahamas, and the coast of Morocco in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where a model of individual freedom was established that is celebrated to this day.

Thus, ultimately, the island is a utopian concept of subjectivity and its geographic location. This connection is effectively underscored in MAP’s use of mirrors. Reflecting the images of spectators in the gallery back at them, the Lacanian mirror stage, that moment of narcissistic ego formation that allows individuals to distinguish themselves from “the Other,” is slyly evoked. Standing in the midst of the crowded opening and suddenly noticing one’s distorted doppelgänger across the room, one couldn’t help but think Donne’s famous assertion a dirty lie.