Map Office’s new video work Runscape depicts the city landscape by addressing its status as a space for social and political play. While two individuals run and parkour through Hong Kong, a narrator lectures about the implications of their contemporary urbanism.As Guy Debord and the Situationists once theorized, urban areas tend to constrain individuals. Runscape showcases the positive and transformative power that extreme physical activities can provide. In the case of running, parkour and skateboarding, existing constraints can initiate in-motion improvisation and re-appropriation of existing surroundings, allowing the city to become a playground for any individual willing to hijack an urban space.
In Runscape, the runner becomes a bridge between the speech of the narrator and the city itself. He plows through foot bridges, roads, terraces and rooftops, with no specific destination in mind. While sprinting through the city, the runner’s course calls our attention to his surroundings, instead of to the runner himself. As we follow him, the urban maze of Hong Kong comes bounding into view.In a city where most of the population spends their daily life staring at screens—from computers to smart phones to billboards to cinemas—Runscape bring us back to the physical city, a city that comes to resemble a virtual game space. By advertising running not as a traditional physical workout, but as a political act of gaining individual freedom, Map Office designs an urban narrative in which the main character is the metropolis.