This special edition of the Atlas of Asia Art Archive is produced on the occasion of MAP Office's residency programme at Asia Art Archive in 2012.

MAP Office conducted a residency at AAA from February to July 2012. As part of their residency, the artist/architect duo is creating an atlas of real and imaginary places found in the Archive, a unique visual cartography in which combinations of text and image dissolve the conventional borders of Asia. The atlas is about artists and the territories they invent, use, appropriate, and transform. It is a new categorisation of Asia, in the same way that Jose Luis Borges refers to an ancient Chinese encyclopædia entitled 'Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.' The atlas becomes a cataloguing system in which the territory of Asia Art Archive defines its own physical and mental contours. The various territories are classified by constructing heterotopian platforms based on productive processes - first the physical place of the Archive (spatial dimension); its content extended to an artistic narrative (artistic practice); and finally the temporal accumulation of the Archive (cultural strategy). In continuity with their current practice, Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix are here attracted by territorial concerns, walking the line between art and architecture, aesthetics and activism, image and text.

An installation within the Archive was presented from August to September 2012. For further information on the residency, please click here.

Signed by the artists. This edition contains 113 leaves of unbound pages stacked together in a box and comes with a separate bibliography.