Marjetica Potrč

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect who works with local communities to devise sustainable solutions for quality-of-life issues affecting people in informal cities. She has spent months in the Western Balkans and the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, among many other places, working closely with residents and using existing materials to create designs that improve living conditions in substantial ways. Her work is driven by her belief that “citizens are the ones who make the city.”

Potrč put her participatory design principles to the test in 2003 when she spent half a year studying first-hand the barrios of Caracas, where the unavailability of running water presents major challenges. Potrč responded by developing – in collaboration with the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov and the people of the La Vega barrio – a “dry toilet,” an ecologically sound toilet that converts human waste to fertilizer. Today, dry toilets have been installed in both the informal and formal areas of Caracas, underscoring the fact that the scarcity of water affects the whole city.

Last year, Potrč spent two months in New Orleans investigating the revival of the vernacular architectural style known as the “shotgun house” and the city’s efforts toward self-sustainability. In collaboration with local residents and the sustainable design consultancy FutureProof, Potrč created an educational exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans that examined how locals are reintroducing the practice of rainwater harvesting, which collects run-off storm-water and diverts it to green areas. The collection and use of rainwater helps restore wetlands, preserve the water table in New Orleans, and prevent flooding. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a fully-functioning 1,500-gallon cistern, which will be permanently installed at the International School in New Orleans and will collect rainwater and irrigate a garden on school grounds.

Potrč is as much a social scientist and anthropologist as she is an artist and architect. Her projects, which display a unique sensibility for addressing everyday problems in places where the traditional infrastructure has broken down, break conventional boundaries between the worlds of art and design. Her on-site works and extended research projects serve as the basis for her gallery installations – architectural “case studies” and drawing series that illustrate the pertinent issues and the sustainable solutions she develops with the input and participation of the affected communities. In this sense she is also a mediator and a storyteller. “I mostly work with communities that live in territories that have broken away from the 20th-century ideology of progress,” Potrč has said. “This gives them the freedom to design things according to their own abilities and on their own scale. Their practices reveal a world that is constructed ‘from below.’”