BIO

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana. Her multidisciplinary practice includes drawings, architectural case studies, and public art projects that combine art, architecture, environmental science, and anthropology. Her work emphasizes individual and community empowerment, problem-solving tools, and strategies for the future that look beyond the neoliberal social contract, drawing instead on collaborative processes that reflect the power of collective action and shared knowledge.

While on-site and community-based projects lie at the heart of her practice, in gallery spaces she presents drawings in the form of visual essays and diagrams (often as wall drawings) and architectural case studies – houses constructed in the gallery as examples of real-life situations that convey the resilience of communities. From 2011 to 2018, she was a professor at the University of Fine Arts/HfBK in Hamburg, where she taught Design for the Living World, a course on participatory practices. She and her students worked on community-based projects that highlighted the notion of public space as social agreement. More recently, her work has focused on the relationship between human society and nature, specifically on a shift in cultural attitudes – from being a society of owners to a society of caretakers. Potrč has exhibited her work extensively throughout the world, including at biennials in Venice, São Paulo, and Sydney, and has received numerous honors, notably the Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and, most recently, the Medal for Merit of the Republic of Slovenia (2023).

WORK AT THE EXHIBITION

Caretakers, Guardians, and Sanctuary: Recent Drawings, 2024

Works included: The Time of Humans on the Soča River, 2021; The Land of Caretakers: A Ballad of Piran, 2021; The Land of Guardians, 2021; City of Sanctuary, 2024.

Caretakers, Guardians, and Sanctuary brings together drawings from 2021 to 2024 that showcase humanity’s coexistence with nature. In these works, nature is presented as a subject with potentially legal rights and not as an object for exploitation. This view also changes humanity’s role towards nature: no longer owners, we become the caretakers and guardians of nature. The Time of Humans on the Soča River (Čas ljudi na reki Soča), created for the 2022 Biennale of Sydney and displayed here as a wall drawing, looks at two generations of caretakers for the Soča River in Slovenia. The visual essay The Land of Caretakers: A Ballad of Piran (Dežela skrbnikov: balada o Piranu) and the diagram The Land of Guardians (Dežela varuhov) installed on top of the wall drawing were created for the exhibition Water and Land at the Piran Civic Gallery (2022–2023). Both works, which refer to current challenges facing Piran and the Istrian hinterland, lay out principles for a new agreement with nature based on cooperation, coexistence, and mutual dependence. City of Sanctuary (Mesto zavetja), a diagram created in 2024 for a project at the Seoul Hall of Urbanism and Architecture, envisions the city of Seoul thirty years from now, as the world struggles with the traumatic effects of climate change. To ensure the city’s survival, and their own, both new climate refugees and established residents must embrace the equitable coexistence with nature.

Profile photo: Martina Zaletel