Next Stop, Kiosk [antikvár]

ForewordThis publication is intended not only to accompany Maijetica Potrc's solo exhibition NextStop, Kiosk at Ljubljana's Moderna galerija (Museum of Modern Art); it alsó strives to present, without necessarily being comprehensive, an overview of the artist's work over the past five years. The introductory essay, by exhibition curator Zdenka Badovinac, along with the essay by Gorán Tomcic together, lays a founda-tion for this by reviewing Potrc's earlier sculptural work and establishing timelines for her more recent production.The selected printworks presented here, no less than Potrc's own writings, provide examples of her comparative method of assembling, restructuring, and mediating observations, ideas, and comments about contemporarydtiesand úrban conditions. This way ofworking, confirmed toa largedegree with her solo show She burned her brídges, when she waLked out angríly at Ljubljana's Galerija Skuc in 2000, lies attheintersection ofvarious practicesin urbanism, visualanthropology, and architecture.Thetwo print series, The Puzzle ofKönigsberg (1999) and Llrban (2001) represent narrative itineraries; the first meditates on a monolithic, decaying úrban space, while the second interconnects and juxtaposes dis-parate úrban phenomena from all over the world.The selected writings by Maijetica Potrc, as well as her interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, describe and link parallel úrban realities, presentingfrom various perspectives herthinking about contemporary úrban structures, self-sustainability, individual initiative and empowerment in global cities today.Three sections are devoted to projects created since 2000, for either exhibition spaces or outdoor locations, and emphasize different aspects of the complex character of Potrc's constructions and installations. They start with her contribution to Manifesta 3 (Ljubljana, 2000) and end with the work she created, in collaboration with the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov, for the Caracas Case Project, the resultof an extended stayin Venezuela earlier this year. Organized by the Caracas Úrban Think Tank and Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, the Caracas Case Project is a kind of on-site laboratory for research into more effective úrban planning; itis meantto serve as a catalystfor wider úrban revital-ization while impLementing specific ideas in the informál city of Caracas.Thefinalsection ofthe catalogueoffersinsightinto the installation NextStop, Kiosk, which Matjetica Potrc prepared specifically for the Moderna galerija. Here she "recycles" and combines Sasa J. Máchtig's well-known kiosks with a temporary building structure modeled on the South American palafita, at the same time making reference to building strategies from Rural Studio in Alabama, USA, and the illegal rooftop houses of Belgrade. With this latest hybrid, Maijetica Potrc offers us a kind of "breathing place," as she calls it, a place where we are invited not only to ponder a new approach to planning and creativity but alsó to reconsider the transitory and mobile character of today's úrban spaces, both in regard to questions of power, (self-) perception, cultural representation, and the imag-ination, and alsó in terms ofthe contemporary city's relationship to the values and legacies of modernism.Lívia Páldi