Marjetica Potrč

Biography

In 2003 Potrč was invited to Caracas for six months to study the informal city. Together with the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov and residents of the La Vega district, she installed a waterless toilet on the upper part of the hillside. The district had no connection to the city water supply. The project was called “Dry Toilet”.

She was born in 1953 in Ljubljana, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Her father, Ivan Potrč, was a well-known Slovenian novelist and playwright and chief editor at the publishing house Mladinska Knjiga; her mother, Branka Jurca, was a teacher, a magazine editor and a writer for children. In 1978 Marjetica graduated in architecture from the University of Ljubljana, then turned to sculpture and received degrees in 1986 and 1988. In 1990 she moved to the United States. At that time she was making installations involving walls. “I don’t make objects. I build walls,” she said then.

Among these works are “Two Faces of Utopia” (1993), made for the Slovenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and the series “Theatrum Mundi: Territories” (1993–1996). In 1994 she returned to Ljubljana. Since then her work has sat at the intersection of visual art, architecture and the social sciences. In 1994 she was awarded the Prešeren Fund Award.

The core of her practice consists of on-site projects, research, drawings and “architectural case studies”, as she calls her large gallery installations. These are houses that she calls “theatrical objects”: each reproduces a real building, and beside it a black-and-white photograph of the original is shown. “Duncan Village Core Unit” (first shown in 2002 at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin) is about a settlement in East London, South Africa. The city laid on water, energy and sewage connections and installed ready-made service units, and the residents built their homes around them. “Caracas: Growing Houses” (2012, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin) shows two self-built houses from a Caracas barrio, which grow along with the families who live in them. “Existence is always a coexistence,” Potrč says of this work.

She did her research in places that are reinventing themselves: in the Brazilian state of Acre (2006, in connection with the São Paulo Biennial), in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (2007), and in nine cities of the Western Balkans in the Lost Highway Expedition. Her on-site projects include “Power from Nature” (India and Detroit, 2005), “Between the Waters” in Essen (2010) and “Of Soil and Water: King’s Cross Pond Club” in London (2015), for which she made a natural swimming pond on a building site, with the water cleaned by plants. For the project in Soweto (2014) she and a group of students spent two months working with residents of the Orlando East neighbourhood: a derelict dumping ground became a community space. Some of these works were made with the Rotterdam practice Ooze.

In 2000 Potrč won the Hugo Boss Prize, administered by the Guggenheim Museum, which held a solo exhibition of her work in 2001. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003, 2009), the São Paulo Biennial (1996, 2006), Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997) and the Biennale of Sydney (2022). There she showed a house of wood and rope inspired by the stilt houses of Amazonia, and works about the rights of a river, made with the Wiradjuri elder Ray Woods. From 2011 to 2018 she taught social design at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK). The class was called “Design for the Living World”. I would add that nearly all of Potrč’s projects involve collaborators.

In 2023 she received the Slovenian Medal of Merit.