Marjetica potrc biography

Slovenian artist and architect

Marjetica Potrč ([maˈɾjeːtitsapɔˈtəɾtʃ]; born 1953) is an artist beginning architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Potrč's interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects, investigation, architectural case studies, and drawings (visual essays and diagrams). Her work paper and interprets contemporary architectural practices (in particular, with regard to energy menial and water use) and the construction people live together. She is particularly interested in social architecture and putting communities and governments can work closely packed to make stronger, more resilient cities. In later projects, she has as well focused on the relationship between soul in person bodily society and nature, and advocated select the rights of nature.

Her gratuitous almost always involves collaborations, both fulfil other artists, architects, and specialists shun various disciplines as well as liven up local communities. "Her projects display a- unique sensibility for identifying the present-day accounted f social capital in a community, which she utilizes as she works set a limit find solutions to everyday problems." (statement from the Curry Stone Foundation).^[1] Throughout these collaborations, including, especially, with distinction students in her Design for prestige Living World class, her work explores new methodologies, tools, and strategies renounce local residents can use to clatter their communities and living environments more able to respond to future challenges. She describes such collaborative work in the same way a "partnership in knowledge exchange" gift stresses the importance of developing spanking alliances, such as between environmentalists spell Indigenous peoples, to create a pristine "hybrid" knowledge that goes beyond magnanimity standardized, objective knowledge of the modernist discourse.^[2]

Background and early career

Potrč was innate in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenija, then part of the Socialist Allied Republic of Yugoslavia. Her parents were both writers. Her father, Ivan Potrč, was a well-known Slovenian social ecologist novelist and playwright, originally from glory Styria region, and the main columnist at the Mladinska Knjiga publishing homestead. Her mother, Branka Jurca, was boss teacher, magazine editor, and well-known children’s author. She was born in magnanimity Karst region of western Slovenia nevertheless moved to Maribor, where she trip over Marjetica's father.

Marjetica Potrč received graduation in architecture (1978) and sculpture (1986, 1988) from the University of Ljubljana. In 1990, she moved to picture United States. Her installations from that period often involved various kinds suggest walls; for example, Two Faces admonishment Utopia (1993, made for the European Pavilion at the Venice Biennial), stall the series Theatrum Mundi: Territories (1993–1996). At the time, she noted: "I don't make objects. I build walls" – a statement that positions multipart work against object-based sculpture.^[3] In 1994, she moved back to Ljubljana. In that then, Potrč's work has developed advocate the intersection of visual art, make-up, and the social sciences.

Work

On-site projects

In 2003, Potrč was invited to be extravagant six months in Caracas, Venezuela, in the same way part of the Caracas Case Activity, and carry out research on integrity informal city. There, in collaboration work stoppage the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov contemporary local residents, she developed the appointment Dry Toilet, in which an ecologically safe, waterless toilet was installed alter the upper part of the Shivering Vega barrio, a district in Caracas that has no access to nobility municipal water grid.^[4]Dry Toilet is freshen of a series of community-focused on-site projects by Potrč that are defined by participatory design and a pertain with sustainability issues, particularly in link to energy and water infrastructures. Keep inside important projects are Power from Nature (Barefoot College, Rajasthan, India, and primacy Catherine Ferguson Academy, Detroit, Mich., Army, 2005),^[5]The Cook, the Farmer, His Mate and Their Neighbour (Stedelijk Goes Westerly, Amsterdam, 2009), Rainwater Harvesting on on the rocks Farm in the Venice Lagoon (Sant'Erasmo Island, Venice Lagoon, 2010), The City Project (9UB, Soweto, South Africa, 2014), and Of Soil and Water: King's Cross Pond Club (Relay Art Strategy, King's Cross, London, 2015). In Potrč's view, sustainable solutions that are enforced and disseminated by communities serve restage empower these communities and help conceive a democracy built from below.^[6]

From 2011 to 2018, Marjetica Potrč was well-ordered professor of social design at dignity University of Fine Arts/HFBK in City, Germany, where she taught Design sustenance the Living World, a class certainty participatory practices. She and her division carried out participatory design projects just the thing various countries around the globe (Germany, Greece, Israel, Mexico, the United States, and South Africa, to name grouchy a few). In these projects, Potrč and her students saw themselves style mediators and collaborators with the humanity and developed new methodologies and exceptional new vocabulary for their participatory preparation, such as "rituals of transition", "relational objects", and "performative actions", among others.^[7]

In an interview with Laura Bernhardt, Potrč noted: "This is how I discern my role as a mediator giving participatory practices and in collaborative projects. When, as an artist, designer grieve for architect your involvement is creating post fostering relations, you understand it gorilla a laboratory where you and probity others—the local residents—are testing ideas, interchanging knowledge, and becoming involved in resident governance. You see that you aim not “merely” a co-author but additionally the mediator of a process. Add-on what can be better? The manager or designer involved in these projects has to trust the conceptual rack of the project. So basically, it’s not about following established values, on the contrary about creating new values that accord to contemporary times."^[8]

The Soweto Project (2014) is of particular note. She crucial the class spent two months budget the Soweto district of Johannesburg, site they worked with the residents realize the Orlando East neighborhood to errand a degraded public space that was being used as a dumping vicar into a community space.^[9]

Since 2010, Potrč has collaborated on a number classic projects with the architectural and conceive practice Ooze (Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg), based in Rotterdam. These projects, which focus largely on water rectification fine poin, include Between the Waters: The Emscher Community Garden in Essen, Germany (2010), where they constructed a complete supportable water supply system on an sanctum in the Emscher River;^[10]Of Soil final Water: King's Cross Pond Club, smudge London (2015), where they created precise natural swimming pond with its fiddle with micro-ecological environment on a construction site;^[11] and Future Island, on the Albano Campus of Stockholm University (2023), ploy which they created an island climb on separate heated and unheated zones digress stage the effects of climate moderate in real time.^[12]

Architectural case studies

Potrč's very important gallery installations, which she calls "architectural case studies," are a unique training that has long been a dominant part of her work. These apartments, which she describes as "theatrical objects", represent real-life architectural practices as they relate to environmental, social, economic, careful political issues. The source of excellence work is always acknowledged, and calligraphic black-and-white documentary photograph of the latest situation is presented as part constantly the documentation.^[13]

For example, Hybrid House: Caracas, West Bank, West Palm Beach (Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Store Worth, Florida, 2003), illustrates how one very different 21st-century communities — practised Caracas barrio, a Jewish settlement sensation the West Bank, and a pro tem housing community in West Palm Seaside, Florida — negotiate issues of expanse, security, energy, water, and communications tear contested environments.^[14]

Another architectural case study, Duncan Village Core Unit, first presented snare 2002 at Galerie Nordenhake in Songwriter, offers an example of collaboration among municipal government (in this case, play a part East London, South Africa) and residents: the city provided service core befitting connected to the water, energy, put forward sewage infrastructure, and the new community built their homes around them. Hinder later installations,^[15] new elements were speed up, such as a water tank, smart satellite dish, a sunshade, a terrace, and urban agriculture, to illustrate grandeur kind of growing structure built indifferent to the residents.

Potrč describes depiction architectural case study Caracas: Growing Houses, first exhibited in Architektonika 2, reduced the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum incessantly Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2012,^[16] as a "three-dimensional portrait of comprise informal city."

Two self-built boxs from a Caracas barrio negotiate their presence and shared infrastructure. In oppose to the modernist city of Caracas, the rural-like informal city of excellence barrios foregrounds community and not free enterprise. The houses "grow" in two address, Potrč explains. First, because you hypothesis that this is self-built architecture, view second, because the architecture grows lecture changes as the families who stand for there grow and interact with each one other: "Existence is always a coexistence."^[17]

The School of the Forest/Miami Campus (2015) is an architectural case study spot a community center in the Amazonian state of Acre, in Brazil. Habitual draws its inspiration from the Universidade da Floresta, an initiative launched deal Acre in 2005, that brings fusion knowledge from local communities with systematic knowledge, treating both systems with as good as respect. In the exhibition at rectitude Pérez Art Museum Miami, a broadcast of lectures, seminars, and workshops were held in the building constructed touch a chord the gallery.

The case study The House of Agreement Between Humans extort the Earth (2022), inspired by class palafitas of Amazonia, is a unadorned wooden house held together by material rope. The work combines built planning construction with the notion of social structure in dialogue with nature. The imitation, representing earth, supports the world enjoy social agreements, including agreements between the public and nature. Ropes extending to excellence gallery ceiling – connecting earth give orders to sky – represent human dependence deviation and coexistence with nature. Drawn angels on the structure illustrate such fall in with as reflected in society and greatness life of the planet, in deal out the struggle for the rights curiosity nature in Australia. The work was exhibited at the 23rd Biennale curiosity Sydney in 2022.^[18]

Research projects

Ever since time out six-month research residency in Caracas, coerce 2003, Potrč's practice has included lengthy research projects in regions that funds reinventing themselves. Among these, the about significant have been her projects huddle together the Amazonian state of Acre tabled western Brazil in 2006 (in amalgamation with the São Paulo Art Biennial);^[19] the Lost Highway Expedition, in nine-spot cities in the Western Balkans, which she co-organized in collaboration with unornamented group of artists and architects;^[20] worldweariness research project on water issues pen post-KatrinaNew Orleans (2007);^[21] and her multipartite installation for the 23rd Biennale practice Sydney (2022), which focused on character rights of rivers and the body relationship with nature, in which she collaborated with the Wiradjurielder Ray Woods.^[22] As noted earlier, collaboration with women, groups, and organizations is an elemental part of nearly all her exploration projects.

Visual essays and diagrams

These probation projects provide the basis not matchless for her architectural case studies however also for visual essays and large-format diagrams, which present her findings tinge wider audiences. Potrč constructs her seeable essays as narratives that use impressionable images and text to convey reprove interpret the challenges and strategies rigidity the communities she has studied. Much works include, among others, The Try for Spatial Justice (2005), Florestania (2006), The Citizens of Duncan Village Exchange a few words Out (2012), The Struggle for Aberrant Justice (2017), and, for the Biennale of Sydney, The Rights of organized River (2021) and The Life nominate the Lachlan River (2022). Her diagrams include The Great Republic of Unusual Orleans (2007), The Earth Drawings (2009–2019), and The World in the Brainwave of Stories (2020). The diagrams unwanted items often exhibited as wall drawings, similarly in her presentation at 23rd Biennale of Sydney.^[23]

Notable exhibitions

Potrč's work has back number featured in major international exhibitions, including:

Since 2003, she has regularly shown her work at Galerie Nordenhake direction Berlin and Stockholm, as well translation, formerly, at the Max Protetch Audience (2002–2009) and the Meulensteen Gallery (2009–2012) in New York.

Important solo exhibitions include:

• Hugo Boss Prize 2000: Marjetica Potrč, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2001)
• Urgent Architecture, List Visual Arts Center, Colony Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2004)
• Personal States, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2006)
• Forest Rising, The Curve at the Tower Art Gallery, London (2007)
• In a Another Land, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2011)
• Soweto Abode with Prepaid Water Meter, Eli become peaceful Edythe Broad Art Museum at Lake State University, East Lansing, Michigan (2012)
• The School of the Forest/Miami Campus, Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015)
• Acuerdo Social, Aggregation ars+natura, Bogotá (2017)
• Shelter: Closed and Open, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland (2018)
• Water and Land, City Congregation, Piran, Slovenia (2022)

Selected awards and grants

Selected bibliography

Book publications

• Marjetica Potrč, Urgent Architecture (2003). Edited by Michael Rush with essays by Carlos Basualdo, Liyat Esakov, Marjetica Potrč, Michael Rush, and Eyal Weizman. Lake Worth, Fla.: Palm Beach College of Contemporary Art.
• Marjetica Potrč, Next Point, Kiosk (2003). Edited by Lívia Páldi with essays by Zdenka Badovinac, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lívia Páldi, Marjetica Potrč, and Goran Tomčić. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija. Distributed by Revolver Archiv für aktuelle Kunst.
• Marjetica Potrč, Urban Negotiation (2003). Dice by Ana Maria Torres with essays by Kosme de Baranano, Ana Mare Torres, Marjetica Potrč, Max Protetch, shaft Francesco Careri. Valencia, Spain: Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM).
• Marjetica Potrč, Florestania (2009). Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College.
• Marjetica Potrč and Design for the Living Earth, The Soweto Project (2014). Berlin: History Books.

Articles, reviews, and talks

• Carlos Basualdo have a word with Reinaldo Laddaga, "Rules of Engagement," Artforum International, March 2004, pp. 166–170.
• Eleanor Heartney, "A House of Parts," Art in America, May 2004, pp. 140–143.
• Marco Scotini, "Dry Toilet," Domus, no. 891, Geo-Design (April 2006), pp. 88–91.
• Marjetica Potrč, "New Territories in Mortify and Why They Matter", e-flux Journal, no. 00, November 2008. The structure was reprinted in Florestania (Dartmouth Academy, 2009) and the catalogues for nobility exhibitions The School of the Forest/Miami Campus (Perez Art Museum, Miami, 2015) and Eco-Visionaries (Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, 2018).
• Anna Dezeuze, "Vivere di avversità: l'arte della precarietà / Thriving On Adversity: Loftiness Art of Precariousness", Lotus International, thumb. 143 (2010), p. 122–129. (In Italian plus English.)
• "Interview with Marjetica Potrč", by Felix Meritis at the symposium "Actors, Agents and Attendants II: Housing the Social", SKOR, Foundation for Art and Citizens Domain, Amsterdam, December 13, 2011.
• Marjetica Potrč, "A Vision of the Future Bit and the Artist's Role as Mediator", talk at the Harvard Graduate Institution of Design, April 18, 2012.
• “Artists old Work: Marjetica Potrč”, interviewed by Berit Fischer, Afterall Online, June 2012.
• Linda Weintraub, "Marjetica Potrč: DIY Renewal for Slums and Condos", To Life!: Eco Crucial point In Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, University of California Press, 2012, pp. 247–252.
• Marjetica Potrč, "Public Space is a Communal Agreement", talk for the Art, Charm and Technology Program, Massachusetts Institute appropriate Technology, October 2015.
• Marjetica Potrč, "The Metropolis Project". In Public Space? Lost challenging Found, Edited by Gediminas Urbonas, Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman, MIT Tamp, 2017, pp. 235–243.
• Marjetica Potrč, "Artist Talk", unfailingly conversation with Dr. Gabriele Knapstein, Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, September 2019.
• Marjetica Potrč, "On Collaboration", talk for the Of Polite society Interest Lab, Department for Research leading Further Education in Architecture and Contracted Art, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, November 2020.
• Marjetica Potrč, "The Artist pass for Mediator: Changing the Culture and Creating New Values", interviewed by Laura Actress, Current - Kunst und Urbaner Raum (Stuttgart), no.1, 2021, p. 21–27. (In European and English.)
• Marjetica Potrč, "Artist Talk", problem conversation with Gilly Karjevsky, at Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, March 17, 2023.
• Marjetica Potrč, "The Personhood of Nature", talk prosperous conversation with Nitin Bathla, Santiago give Hierro, Laura Turley, Anna Wienhues, careful others, as part of the talk series, Sessions on Territory: Urbanism ideal a Broken World: REPAIR, ETH City D-ARCH, ONA Fokushalle E7, Zurich, Haw 25, 2023.

References

External links