To subscribe to Afterall journal, starting with this issue, please click here.
All back issue texts, excluding some from the two most recent issues, are available to view online.
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
