Marjetica Potrč (; born 1953) is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Potrč's interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects, research, architectural case studies, and drawings (visual essays and diagrams). Her work documents and interprets contemporary architectural practices (in particular, with regard to energy infrastructure and water use) and the ways people live together. She is especially interested in social architecture and how communities and governments can work together to make stronger, more resilient cities. In later projects, she has also focused on the relationship between human society and nature, and advocated for the rights of nature.
Her work almost always involves collaborations, both with other artists, architects, and specialists from various disciplines as well as with local communities. "Her projects display a unique sensibility for identifying the existing social capital in a community, which she utilizes as she works to find solutions to everyday problems." (statement from the Curry Stone Foundation).Curry Stone Foundation, "Marjetica Potrč". Through these collaborations, including, especially, with the students in her Design for the Living World class, her work explores new methodologies, tools, and strategies that local residents can use to make their communities and living environments better able to respond to future challenges. She describes such collaborative work as a "partnership in knowledge exchange" and stresses the importance of developing new alliances, such as between environmentalists and Indigenous peoples, to create a new "hybrid" knowledge that goes beyond the standardized, objective knowledge of the modernist discourse.Marjetica Potrč, "The Personhood of Nature", lecture in the series "Sessions on Territory – Urbanism in a Broken World: Repair", at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, May 15, 2023.
Background and early career Potrč was born in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Her parents were both writers. Her father, Ivan Potrč, was a well-known Slovenian social realist novelist and playwright, originally from the Styria region, and the main editor at the Mladinska Knjiga publishing house. Her mother, Branka Jurca, was a teacher, magazine editor, and well-known children’s author. She was born in the Karst 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 United States. Her installations from this period often involved various kinds of walls; for example, Two Faces of Utopia (1993, made for the Slovenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial), and the series Theatrum Mundi: Territories (1993–1996). At the time, she noted: "I don't make objects. I build walls" – a statement that positions her work against object-based sculpture.Quoted in Goran Tomčić's interview with Marjetica Potrč in Bomb, no. 58, Jan. 1, 1997. In 1994, she moved back to Ljubljana. Since then, Potrč's work has developed at the intersection of visual art, architecture, and the social sciences.
Work On-site projects
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 local residents, she developed the project Dry Toilet, in which 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.See Marco Scotini, "Dry Toilet", Domus, no. 891 (April 2006): 88-91 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 Power from Nature (Barefoot College, Rajasthan, India, and the Catherine Ferguson Academy, Detroit, Mich., USA, 2005),Ginger Danto, "The Nobel Garden Prize Winner", The New York Times, June 27, 2004. The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour (Stedelijk Goes West, Amsterdam, 2009), Rainwater Harvesting on a Farm in the Venice Lagoon (Sant'Erasmo Island, Venice Lagoon, 2010), The Soweto Project (9UB, Soweto, South Africa, 2014), and Of Soil and Water: King's Cross Pond Club (Relay Art Programme, King's Cross, London, 2015). In Potrč's view, sustainable solutions that are implemented and disseminated by communities serve to empower these communities and help create a democracy built from below.See Marjetica Potrč, "Frontier Power: Human Bodies, Building Facades and Fragmented Territories," in Islands + Ghettos, exhibition catalogue (Heidelberg: Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2008), pp. 50–67.
From 2011 to 2018, Marjetica Potrč was a professor of social design at the University of Fine Arts/HFBK in Hamburg, Germany, where she taught Design for the Living World, a class on participatory practices. She and her students carried out participatory design projects in various countries around the globe (Germany, Greece, Israel, Mexico, the United States, and South Africa, to name just a few). In these projects, Potrč and her students saw themselves as mediators and collaborators with the community and developed new methodologies and a new vocabulary for their participatory practice, such as "rituals of transition", "relational objects", and "performative actions", among others.Marjetica Potrč, "Shaping the City through Participatory Design", interviewed by Boštjan Bugarič, Architectuul, Nov. 22, 2014.
In an interview with Laura Bernhardt, Potrč noted: "This is how I understand my role as a mediator in participatory practices and in collaborative projects. When, as an artist, designer or architect your involvement is creating and fostering relations, you understand it as a laboratory where you and the others—the local residents—are testing ideas, exchanging knowledge, and becoming involved in local governance. You see that you are not “merely” a co-author but also the mediator of a process. And what can be better? The artist or designer involved in these projects has to trust the conceptual framework of the project. So basically, it’s not about following established values, but about creating new values that correspond to contemporary times."Marjetica Potrč, "The Artist as Mediator: Changing the Culture and Creating New Values", interviewed by Laura Bernhardt, Current – Kunst und Urbaner Raum (Stuttgart), no.1, 2021, p. 26, available here.
The Soweto Project (2014) is of particular note. She and the class spent two months in the Soweto district of Johannesburg, where they worked with the residents of the Orlando East neighborhood to transform a degraded public space that was being used as a dumping ground into a community space.The project was carried out as part of the umbrella project Nine Urban Biotypes – Negotiating the Future of Urban Living. For more information on The Soweto Project, see the Design for the Living World website.
Since 2010, Potrč has collaborated on a number of projects with the architectural and design practice Ooze (Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg), based in Rotterdam. These projects, which focus largely on water purification, include Between the Waters: The Emscher Community Garden in Essen, Germany (2010), where they constructed a complete sustainable water supply system on an island in the Emscher River;See Nico Saieh, "Between the Waters: The Emscher Community Garden / Marjetica Potrč and Ooze", ArchDaily, July 6, 2010. Of Soil and Water: King's Cross Pond Club, in London (2015), where they created a natural swimming pond with its own micro-ecological environment on a construction site;See the description on Potrč's website. For a perspective on the project by a local participant, see Sally Goble, "Come on in, the water's freezing: The joys of a winter swimming club", The Guardian, Feb. 16, 2016; and for an analysis by a landscape architect, see Erik Schofield, "5 Odd Things You Should Know Before Taking a Dip in King's Cross Pond", Land 8: Landscape Architects Network, Dec. 22, 2015. and Future Island, on the Albano Campus of Stockholm University (2023), in which they created an island with separate heated and unheated zones that stage the effects of climate change in real time.See also the project's presentation at the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2021, Future Island in Venice: The Time of Stone.
Architectural case studies
Potrč's large gallery installations, which she calls "architectural case studies," are a unique practice that has long been a central part of her work. These houses, which she describes as "theatrical objects", represent real-life architectural practices as they relate to environmental, social, economic, and political issues. The source of the work is always acknowledged, and a black-and-white documentary photograph of the original situation is presented as part of the documentation.Marjetica Potrč, "Architectural Case Studies".
For example, Hybrid House: Caracas, West Bank, West Palm Beach (Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, Florida, 2003), illustrates how three very different 21st-century communities — a Caracas barrio, a Jewish settlement on the West Bank, and a temporary housing community in West Palm Beach, Florida — negotiate issues of space, security, energy, water, and communications in contested environments.See Marjetica Potrč: Urgent Architecture, ed. Michael Rush (Lake Worth, FL: Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, 2003).
Another architectural case study, Duncan Village Core Unit, first presented in 2002 at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin, offers an example of collaboration between municipal government (in this case, in East London, South Africa) and residents: the city provided service core units connected to the water, energy, and sewage infrastructure, and the new residents built their homes around them. In later installations,At Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe), Art Basel, and Ar/Ge Kunst (Bolzano), all in 2003; at the 1st Łódź Biennial in 2004; and at Kunsthalle Nürnberg and KAI 10 (Dusseldorf) in 2016. new elements were added, such as a water tank, a satellite dish, a sunshade, a house, and urban agriculture, to illustrate the kind of growing structure built by the residents.
Potrč describes the architectural case study Caracas: Growing Houses, first exhibited in Architektonika 2, at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2012,The work was exhibited again in the exhibition Hello World: Revisiting a Collection (2018), also at the Hamburger Bahnhof. as a "three-dimensional portrait of an informal city." Two self-built houses from a Caracas barrio negotiate their presence and shared infrastructure. In contrast to the modernist city of Caracas, the rural-like informal city of the barrios foregrounds community and not individualism. The houses "grow" in two ways, Potrč explains. First, because you see that this is self-built architecture, and second, because the architecture grows and changes as the families who live there grow and interact with each other: "Existence is always a coexistence."Marjetica Potrč, speaking at Hamburger Bahnhof, June 17, 2019.
The School of the Forest/Miami Campus (2015) is an architectural case study of a community center in the Amazonian state of Acre, in Brazil. It draws its inspiration from the Universidade da Floresta, an initiative launched in Acre in 2005, that brings together knowledge from local communities with scientific knowledge, treating both systems with equal respect. In the exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, a series of lectures, seminars, and workshops were held in the building constructed in the gallery.