Marjetica Potrč (pronounced [maˈrjetitsa pɔˈtr̩tʃ]; born 1953) is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects, research, architectural case studies, and series of drawings. Her work documents and interprets contemporary architectural practices (in particular, with regard to energy infrastructure and water use) and the ways people live together.
Contents |
Potrč was born in Ljubljana, capital of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, which was then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Her parents were both writers. Her father, Ivan Potrč, was a well-known Slovene social realist novelist and playwright from Lower Styria, and the main editor of the publishing house Mladinska Knjiga. Her mother, Branka Jurca, was a teacher and magazine editor and also a famous author of children's literature, who was born in the Kras region of western Slovenia but moved to Maribor, where she met Marjetica's father.
Marjetica Potrč received degrees in architecture (1978) and sculpture (1986, 1988) from the University of Ljubljana. In 1990, she moved to the USA. Her installations from this period often involved walls of various kinds, e.g. Two Faces of Utopia (1993, made for the Slovene Pavilion at the Venice Biennial), and the series Theatrum Mundi: Territories (1993–1996). A statement she made at the time - "I don't make objects. I build walls" - positions her work against object-based sculpture.[1] In 1994, she moved back to Ljubljana. Since then, her work has developed at the intersection of visual art, architecture, and social science.
In 2003, Potrč was invited to spend six months in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of the Caracas Case Project, and carry out research on the informal city. There, in collaboration with the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov and the residents of the La Vega barrio, she developed the project Dry Toilet: an ecologically safe, waterless toilet was installed in the upper part of the La Vega barrio, a district in Caracas that has no access to the municipal water grid.[2] Dry Toilet is one of a series of community-focused on-site projects by Potrč that are characterized by participatory design and a concern with sustainability issues, particularly in relation to energy and water infrastructures. Other important projects are Balcony with Wind Turbine (Liverpool, 2004), Power from Nature (Barefoot College, Rajasthan, India, and the Catherine Ferguson Academy, Detroit, Mich., USA, 2005),[3] and A Farm in Murcia: Rainwater Harvesting (Murcia, Spain, 2007).[4] In Potrč's view, the sustainable solutions that are implemented and disseminated by communities serve to empower these communities and help create a democracy built from below.[5]
Potrč's large gallery installations, which she calls "architectural case studies," are a unique practice and have long been a central part of her work; they aim to translate into the gallery space her view of contemporary architectural practices and their relationship to issues of energy, water use, and communication.[6] For example, soon after the Dry Toilet project, she created Hybrid House: Caracas, West Bank, West Palm Beach at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Lake Worth, Fla., in 2003 (the following year, the installation traveled to the List Visual Arts Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.). The installation represents a case study of three contemporary communities in conflict - the Caracas barrio, the West Bank, and West Palm Beach, Florida - and illustrates how they negotiate issues of space, security, energy, water, and communications, bringing to the fore the uneasy coexistence of different communities in 21st-century societies.[7] In one of her most controversial and most often quoted statements, Potrč has observed: "There are two urban forms in the global city that I consider to be most successful - after all, they are growing the fastest - namely, gated communities and shantytowns."[8]
Beginning with her six-month-long research in Caracas in 2003, Potrč's practice has been distinguished by extended research projects in regions that are reinventing themselves after the decline of 20th-century modernism. Most significant have been her projects in the Amazonian state of Acre in western Brazil in 2006 (in conjunction with the São Paulo Art Biennial);[9][10] the Lost Highway Expedition in nine cities in the Western Balkans (Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Pristina, Tirana, Podgorica, and Sarajevo), which she co-organized in collaboration with a group of artists and architects;[11] and her research project on water issues in post-Katrina New Orleans, in which she collaborated with the design consultancy FutureProof in 2007-2008.[12] Collaboration with local individuals, groups, and organizations is a significant aspect of nearly all her research projects.
These research projects provide the basis for later drawing series and architectural case studies, which translate her findings to wider audiences. Potrč constructs her drawings as narratives that present and interpret with simple images and text the challenges and strategies of the communities she has studied. Her drawing series include, among others, The Struggle for Spacial Justice (2005), Florestania (2006), and The Great Republic of New Orleans (2007).[13]
Potrč's work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas, including in such important international shows as the São Paulo Biennial (1996 and 2006), and the Venice Biennial (in the exhibitions The Structure of Survival, 2003, and "Making Worlds", 2009). She has shown her work regularly at the Meulensteen Gallery (formerly the Max Protetch Gallery) in New York since 2002, and at the Nordenhake Gallery in Berlin and Stockholm since 2003, and has also had solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2001),[14] the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2004), the Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2006), and the Curve at the Barbican Art Gallery in London (2007), among others.
Potrč has received numerous grants and awards, including two grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1993 and 1999); the Hugo Boss Prize in 2000,[15] administered by the Guggenheim Museum (2000); and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship at The New School in New York (2007).