The uninhabitable: shantytowns, townships.
- Georges Perec, Espèces de Espaces

The uncontrolled urban manifestations and 'informal' architecture found at the margins of the megalopolis are the subject matter of Marjetica Potrč's borderline practice between art and architecture. Formally trained as an architect, she now performs exercises in the politics of the uninhabitable. Her 'urban' and 'architectural' structures map out individual building 'solutions' to the endemic housing problems which effect the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the third world, solutions which she has found ingenious in terms of survival in a global, neo-liberal economy. In the exhibition spaces of the museums and galleries of the first world Potrc builds structures that summarise the underlying principles of the models encountered during her research, and in doing so, draws a cartography of this 'new' or, rather, 'informal' urbanism. This, in turn, outlines the real lived connections between modes of social organisation and community, and the particular politics of governance and housing.

Potrč's work is neither political nor architectural in a direct sense. In the museum space, the 'constructions' are devoid of any real function regarding shelter. Instead they become aesthetic vehicles that seek to dramatise contemporary architecture and its approach to this very concrete problem of housing in the third world.

Potrč's work can be inscribed in a long-standing tradition of artists who have worked with architecture, some of whom have collaborated with architects to produce real buildings, others who have questioned architecture from within, articulating a critique that ultimately unravels in an acknowledgement of the failure of architecture's utopian aspirations. The twentieth century produced countless experiments in urban planning and architecture, a wave of experimentation that naturally extended into the realm of art and avant-garde movements such as Russian constructivism, Futurism, the Bauhaus and De Stijl. The house became a site for artistic and ideological speculation, a platform for the materialisation of the ideals of the machine age but also a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art in itself. In the post-World War II period, a critique of the post-industrial city and its dynamics became more prevalent. The Situationists - who were active not only as artists but who were also engaged in critical practice via publications such as Potlatch - brought about an important shift in art's relation to architecture. In 1969 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened an exhibition, which, according to issue #30 of Potlatch, consisted of 'initial experiments by Constant (which) do no more than state the problem of unitary urbanism. Nevertheless, this exhibition could mark the turning point, in the modern world of art production, between self-sufficient merchandise-objects, meant solely to be looked at, and project-objects, whose more complex appreciation calls for some sort of action, an action on a higher level having to do with the totality of life.' This sort of conceptualisation of architecture within artistic practice also informs the work of many artists who have dealt with architecture since then, such as Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and, more specifically, Gordon Matta-Clark and his concept of 'anarchitecture'; as well as Krzysztof Wodiczko and his experiments in nomadic architecture for the homeless. This idea can also be used as an instrument for the critical evaluation of Potrc's work as it deploys certain programmatic instances of architecture in order to create 'discursive' objects within the museum space. And whereas in the work of Smithson and Matta-Clark there was no real allusion to a concrete 'social activism' anchored in the politics of the outside world, in Potrč's work there seems to be a desire for agency that goes beyond the museum's walls and has a real social incidence in housing politics worldwide.¹

The House in the Museum

The house has had quite an exhibition history throughout the past century, especially during the 40s and 50s when museums, world and trade fairs, and even department stores were the venues for shows that promoted a 'modern' lifestyle. These displays were closely linked to the housing policies of pre-war Europe² as well as to the interests of developers and the construction industry in the United States after 1945.³ During World War II the Museum of Modern Art in New York initiated a series of exhibitions featuring full-scale prototypes of houses in its garden, with the installation of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Deployment Unit (Defense House) in 1941 and a Quonset hut/bomb-shelter in 1945. At roughly the same time more concrete experiments were carried out in the West Coast such as the Case Study House Program in Southern California, which produced real prototypes outside the museum setting. After the war MoMA continued to present exhibitions related to design and the domestic; 'Tomorrow's Small House' (1945) and the installation of Marcel Breuer's House in the Garden (1949), as well as a series of exhibitions devoted to industrial and interior design. Each raised questions about the precise intention of the museum in producing such exhibitions, the kind of public to which they were addressed at and the interests and agendas they were serving outside the scope of a traditional museum practice.⁴ These questions may be applied to Potrc's installations within museum spaces, because even though motivated by very different interests, they seem to address a range of issues perhaps better examined in other contexts. Yet, even a brief survey of the house's place and history within the museum helps shed light on the discursive power of the domestic and its effectiveness in raising some kind of public consciousness in terms of our immediate built environment.⁵

Marjetica Potrč's strategy relies precisely on this power of the dwelling to summon a reflection on a wider set of issues by exhibiting housing and other domestic solutions or prototypes in the museum space. Her series of installations, grouped under the name of Contemporary Building Strategies and presented in museums around the world, is an inventory of improvised, emergency or spontaneous building solutions to situations of crisis, such as the uncontrolled and unplanned growth of cities, or more urgent needs following natural disasters, war and the flight of refugees. From these sources encountered in her travels and research she takes the fundamental elements and constructs hybrid or 'abridged' prototypes of the original 'models'.⁶ It seems to me that Potrč's nomenclature is more related to the concept of the 'tactical' than the 'strategic'. Strategy has to do with planning in time and space, and also with the mobilisation of different constituencies and forces, while 'tactics' are more suitable to describe emergency solutions, conceived on the spur of the moment to counteract specific situations of crisis. What she labels as organic growth, referring to the uncontrolled reproduction and proliferation of the shanties in Latin American cities, is indeed organic and not strategic or planned as such. Thus a shanty, or for that matter a refugee shelter or any of the other 'typologies' that conform this body of work, cannot constitute 'building strategies' in the strict meaning of the word. In this sense, her installations are evocative of urgency and emergency in the current state of affairs. Her recent exhibition at the Palm Beach ICA featured, besides the main installation that focused on the architecture of the Venezuelan shantytowns, a fortified West Bank settler housing unit and trailer-park homes in West Palm Beach, a set of what the artist calls Power Tools. These are devices to facilitate survival in challenging situations, including a 'Clockwork Mobile Telephone Charger', a 'Survival Kit' left in the desert by Mexican and US non-governmental organisations for would-be illegal immigrants (not exhibited in the PBICA exhibition), and most notably a 'Hippo Water Roller', a South African invention that frees the women of the townships from the taxing physical task of carrying large buckets of water on their heads, while also protecting them from the occasional landmine. It is interesting to note that these objects confirm the idea of 'tactic' in Potrč's work. These artefacts are by no means definitive solutions to the very real and substantial problems they temporarily remedy. Ultimately, these objects attest to local ingenuity and the immediate approach necessary when dealing with fundamental problems that must be solved at a political level with the drafting of specific policies, laws and treaties.

The same could be said for many of her Constructions - similar to the Power Tools, they speak of immediacy, of temporary solution. This would seem to indicate that Potrc is aiming at some kind of new take on critical regionalism, or recent ideas on 'Urban Acupuncture'.⁷ Nevertheless, there is something disturbing in the lack of a real spatial treatment in some of these 'prototypes'. The structures do not have an interior and do not demonstrate the concrete effectiveness of the proposals in terms of the basic requirements of architectural design, specifically those related to proper ventilation, illumination and the quality of living space. On the other hand, de-contextualised from their original sites and in the pristine space of the museum, they have an aesthetic quality, a certain kind of beauty. The notion of beauty here is a complex one because it entails an ontological conception of the term, suggesting the idea of utopia. Yet when Potrč compares the beauty that she finds in the shantytowns of the dispossessed with the gated communities of the wealthy, she employs an irony that points to the unravelling of utopian dreams and the presence of undisputed ugliness.

Utopia, Heterotopia or Dystopia?

Potrc has stated that utopia is no longer a relevant concept.⁸ She is critical of current methods of city planning, citing the massive failure worldwide to identify, let alone solve, the daily problems of city life. For her, 'the present time is about self-reliability, individual initiatives and small-scale projects'. However, these ideas of self-reliance, as well as her appreciation of the shanty and the gated community as the two most successful, and also beautiful, forms of architecture today, certainly do bring to mind some utopian ways of thinking. One cannot help but think of some of the previous experiments in isolation (as in gated community) and self-reliance (as in shanty) as specifically related to utopian ideals and philosophies that sprung up across the American continent since its discovery. From the Jesuit missions in Paraguay to experiments in 'utopian socialism' such as the Colonia Cecilia in Brazil, the Shaker communities of New England, as well as the Fourierist and Owenite phalanxes that informed and problematised not only the construction of national sovereignties in the newly independent American continent during the 19th century but also addressed the social implications of the industrial revolution. Is Potrč implying that this new-world order brought about by globalisation is in need of a similar way of thinking, a new utopian conception of the dwelling, the city and its dynamics? Is she proposing a new utopia? Or is she exhibiting the dynamics of other places, of heterotopias, a concept thoroughly explored by Foucault in order to explain our contemporary preoccupation with space? Many of the spaces she describes in her installations could indeed fit some of the heterotopic instances described by Foucault. Her practice, instead of being architectural or artistic, could be labelled using his term, as some sort of heterotopology, in the sense that it constitutes a type of study of these 'other spaces'.⁹

Potrč's inventory of 'housing solutions' comes to enrich the much larger catalogue of the museum, which has housed its share of shanties throughout its recent history. Unlike the aforementioned examples of the bourgeois dwelling in the museum, shanties have been traditionally relegated to the space of the ethnographic museum or exhibition. They were shown as building typologies related to the primitive, to primordial shelters, to the quintessential primitive hut. Nevertheless, the shanty has found its way into the art museum as well, and three important examples come to mind, all by Latin American artists who obviously have had an extensive and much closer exposure to the shanty, since it is an integral part of metropolises such as Caracas or Rio de Janeiro. These works reveal three very distinct discursive instances of the shanty in the museum space. Antonieta Sosa's 1981 Situación titulada casa was a groundbreaking work that for the first time in Venezuela introduced a shanty into the museum space. The piece sought to break from the minimalist canon that would have seemed the natural successor to the Venezuelan kinetic and abstract-geometric tradition, and invested the cube with the discursive weight of our local primitive hut. The evident social and class differences in Venezuelan society are played out in the figure of the shanty, here reproduced as modernist sculpture, with its own complex play of class and status. Another work by Meyer Vaisman uses the iconography of the shanty to serve as a painful reminder of the social reality to the many who, in their sheltered lives in the formal city, do not so readily want to acknowledge, or deal with it. Meyer Vaisman's Verde por fuera, rojo por dentro (1993) stages the private space of a middle-class-boy's bedroom inside the paradigmatic form of the shanty.¹⁰ The space is inaccessible, and only partially visible through the holes in the hipbones embedded among the shanty's bricks. Finally, Hélio Oiticica's Penetrável Tropicalia (1967) and Eden (1969) both situate us within an aesthetics of the margins, tinged with the Edenic and utopian motifs that motivated the construction of the Brazilian nation. Tropicalia and Eden both engage the spectator in a sensory and participatory experience of the margin, of the space of the favela, but do not attempt at any moment to purvey lessons in the construction of a better world or to posit it as an ideal typology. The paradisiacal motifs present in the work of Oiticica do not idealise the reality of the shantytown; it is not proposed as a model, but rather, and much like Meyer Vaisman's shanty, as an everyday reality. Moreover, the shanty does not really pertain to the realm of utopia or heterotopias, but rather it is a reification of dystopia. It is not a figment of the imagination, but a very real and concrete place where life is difficult and, at times, fearful. There is arguably a positive side to the shantytown - its sense of community, of self-reliance and ingenuity - but it is obviously not an ideal space.

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spoke of the possibility of the self in terms of its recognition of 'the other', a recognition that implies responsibility. Marjetica Potrč's work's ontological conceptualisation of beauty, and the social intention behind her travels and research, calls for a reflection on this responsibility towards the other. Her recent drawings and writings on her Caracas project make a series of statements that could have very serious social implications. In them she idealises not only the shanty but also its informal economy and invasion strategies.¹¹ She proposes these as viable and valid alternatives to the formal city and justifies her statements by saying that shelter and water are basic human rights to which everyone is entitled. And of course she is right. What she fails to point out is that it is not the formal city itself that is responsible for the situation, but rather a particular history of abusive power relations presently articulated in local and temporary governments. In the particular case of Venezuela and its capital, Caracas, the current government, in its effort to bring about 'revolutionary' changes, has adopted the operations of invasion, unlawful appropriation of light, water and urban space, informal economies, informal medicine and urban agriculture as some of its tenets. The resultant politics of the ungovernable have produced a lawless state where the power of the gun is now the norm; the same gun that is depicted in Potrč's Caracas drawings as a tool for diverting water from the municipal system. Her documentation and display of these operations, which are at the base of the inexorable path to the informal in the city of Caracas, constitute an archive that undoubtedly seems to point to a politics of the uninhabitable.

In this sense, Marjetica Potrč's work raises some fundamental questions as to the agency of art when presented in the museum space. Is she proposing the museum as an active site for a discussion about social inequality? Does she aim to provoke a sense of responsibility in the spectator? Is her work inscribed within a politics of the 'habitable' or the 'uninhabitable'?

The urban master plan and the museum are both Western cultural constructs, and it is against this Western model that her critique seems to be aimed. But by placing various incompatible paradigms of a world in crisis inside the sheltered space of the museum, she questions the status of that institution. The calm, white retreat of art can suddenly feel, to the uneasy and powerless spectator, like a guilty pleasure in a world fraught with hunger, pain, war, human suffering and toil.

— Julieta Gonzalez