Marjetica Potrč facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Marjetica Potrč
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Marjetica Potrc in 2010
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| Born | 1953 Ljubljana, Socialist Republic of Slovenia, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
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| Nationality | Slovenian |
| Occupation | Artist, Architect |
| Known for | Conceptual art, contemporary art, participatory design |
Marjetica Potrč ([maˈɾjeːtitsa pɔˈtəɾtʃ]; born 1953) is an artist and architect from Ljubljana, Slovenia. She creates art that mixes different fields like art, building design, and social studies. Her work often involves projects built in real places, research, and drawings.
Marjetica Potrč looks at how people live together and how buildings are designed, especially focusing on energy and water. She is very interested in "social architecture," which means how communities and governments can work together to make cities stronger. Later, she also started focusing on how humans and nature connect, supporting the idea of "rights of nature." This means nature should have legal rights, just like people.
Her projects almost always involve working with others. She collaborates with artists, architects, experts, and local communities. She is good at finding the strengths within a community and using them to solve everyday problems. Through these partnerships, she helps people find new ways to improve their living spaces. She calls this a "partnership in knowledge exchange," where everyone shares ideas. She believes it's important to create new connections, like between environmentalists and Indigenous peoples, to build new kinds of knowledge.
Contents
About Marjetica Potrč
Early Life and Education
Marjetica Potrč was born in Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. At that time, Slovenia was part of a country called Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Her parents were both writers. Her father, Ivan Potrč, was a well-known Slovenian writer of novels and plays. Her mother, Branka Jurca, was a teacher, magazine editor, and a famous children’s author.
Marjetica Potrč studied architecture and sculpture at the University of Ljubljana. In 1990, she moved to the United States. During this time, she created art that often used different kinds of walls. She once said, "I don't make objects. I build walls." This showed that her art was different from traditional sculptures. In 1994, she moved back to Ljubljana. Since then, her work has combined visual art, architecture, and social studies.
Marjetica Potrč's Art Projects
On-Site Community Projects
In 2003, Marjetica Potrč went to Caracas, Venezuela, to study how people lived in informal settlements (areas built without official planning). There, she worked with an architect and local people to create the Dry Toilet project. This was an eco-friendly toilet that didn't use water. It was installed in a part of Caracas that didn't have city water.
Dry Toilet is one of many projects where Potrč works with communities to solve problems. These projects often involve "participatory design," meaning local people help design the solutions. They also focus on "sustainability," which means finding ways to use resources like energy and water without harming the environment.
Other important projects include:
- Power from Nature (in India and the USA, 2005)
- The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour (Amsterdam, 2009)
- Rainwater Harvesting on a Farm in the Venice Lagoon (Italy, 2010)
- The Soweto Project (South Africa, 2014)
- Of Soil and Water: King's Cross Pond Club (London, 2015)
Marjetica Potrč believes that when communities create and share sustainable solutions, it makes them stronger and helps build a democracy from the ground up.
From 2011 to 2018, Marjetica Potrč taught social design at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. She taught a class called "Design for the Living World," which focused on working with communities. She and her students did projects in many countries, like Germany, Greece, Mexico, and South Africa. They saw themselves as helpers and partners with the communities.
In an interview, Potrč explained that as an artist or designer in these projects, her role is to help create and build relationships. She sees it as a "laboratory" where she and the local people test ideas, share knowledge, and get involved in local decisions. She believes it's about creating new values that fit today's world.
A special project was The Soweto Project (2014). She and her class spent two months in Soweto, South Africa. They worked with people in the Orlando East neighborhood to turn a dirty public space into a useful community area.
Since 2010, Potrč has also worked with an architectural firm called Ooze. These projects often focus on cleaning water. Some examples are:
- Between the Waters: The Emscher Community Garden (Germany, 2010): They built a full sustainable water system on an island.
- Of Soil and Water: King's Cross Pond Club (London, 2015): They made a natural swimming pond with its own tiny ecosystem.
- Future Island (Sweden, 2023): They created an island that shows the effects of climate change in real time.
Architectural Case Studies
Potrč also creates large art installations in galleries, which she calls "architectural case studies." These are like "theatrical objects" that show real-life building practices and how they relate to the environment, society, money, and politics. She always shows where her ideas come from, often with a photo of the original place.
For example, Hybrid House: Caracas, West Bank, West Palm Beach (2003) showed how three very different communities deal with space, safety, energy, water, and communication. These communities were a neighborhood in Caracas, a Jewish settlement on the West Bank, and a temporary housing area in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Another case study, Duncan Village Core Unit (2002), showed how a city government and its residents worked together. The city in East London, South Africa provided basic service units (for water, energy, and sewage), and new residents built their homes around them. Later versions of this artwork added things like water tanks and gardens to show how these homes grew.
Potrč described Caracas: Growing Houses (2012) as a "three-dimensional portrait of an informal city." It showed two self-built houses from a Caracas neighborhood. Unlike modern cities, these informal areas focus on community, not just individuals. The houses "grow" because they are self-built and change as the families living there grow and interact. Potrč says, "Existence is always a coexistence."
The School of the Forest/Miami Campus (2015) was a case study of a community center in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. It was inspired by a project that combined local community knowledge with scientific knowledge. In the museum exhibition, lectures and workshops were held inside the built structure.
The case study The House of Agreement Between Humans and the Earth (2022) was inspired by traditional Amazonian houses built on stilts. It's a simple wooden house held together by ropes. This artwork combines built architecture with the idea of social agreements, especially between humans and nature. Ropes reaching to the ceiling show how humans depend on nature. Drawings on the house show how society and the planet agree, especially the fight for the rights of nature in Australia. This work was shown at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney in 2022.
Research and Visual Essays
Since 2003, Marjetica Potrč has done many research projects in areas that are changing and reinventing themselves. Some of her most important research includes projects in the Amazonian state of Acre in Brazil (2006), the Lost Highway Expedition in the Western Balkans, and her research on water issues in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (2007). She also worked on a project for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) about the rights of rivers and human connection to nature, collaborating with an Australian Aboriginal elder named Ray Woods. Working with others is a key part of almost all her research.
These research projects lead to her architectural case studies and also to "visual essays" and large "diagrams." These are drawings and texts that share her findings with more people. Her visual essays tell stories using simple images and words to explain the challenges and strategies of the communities she studies. Examples include The Struggle for Spatial Justice (2005) and The Rights of a River (2021). Her diagrams, like The Great Republic of New Orleans (2007), are often shown as drawings on walls.
Important Exhibitions and Awards
Marjetica Potrč's work has been shown in major international art exhibitions, including:
- Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997)
- São Paulo Biennial (1996, 2006)
- Venice Biennale of Art (1993, 2003, 2009)
- Yinchuan Biennial (2018)
- Biennale of Sydney (2022)
She has also had many solo exhibitions, where only her work is shown. Some of these include:
- Hugo Boss Prize 2000: Marjetica Potrč, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2001)
- Urgent Architecture, List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2004)
- Forest Rising, The Curve at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2007)
- The School of the Forest/Miami Campus, Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015)
Marjetica Potrč has received several important awards for her work:
- The Medal of Merit of the Republic of Slovenia (2023)
- Curry Stone Design Prize (2008)
- Hugo Boss Prize (2000)
- Prešeren Fund Award (1994)
See also
In Spanish: Marjetica Potrč para niños
