The Slovenian artist Marjetica
Potrc has been working intensely on the question of the living conditions
and the contemporary urban expansion, especially the tension between
urban development and social crisis such as increasing poverty and
ecological crisis as a reflection to the geopolitical conflicts
in our time of globalisation. She travels around some "difficult
parts" of the world such as Africa and South America to witness
this new urban situation. Lately, she is working on the issue of
urban agriculture as a relieving solution to the disappearance of
contact between urban dwellers and nature. Responding to the geographic
and economic context of the Tuscany region where Arte all’arte
is taking place, Marjetica Potrc decides to contribute with a site-specific
project around the issue of Urban Agriculture. She points out "Future
wars will be fought for water, not oil, and they will be fought
in cities." Therefore, she proposes to create a roof field
to cultivate vegetables in a private house of Siena as sample of
future urban agriculture experiments. The central point is to create
devices to collect and recycle rain water in order to provide water
resources for planting and other everyday uses. Even more remarkable,
Potrc reintroduces her experiments in the "non-western"
cities to the very heart of western history, showing an irreversible
tendency of today’s globalisation: not only human migration
is now changing the western world. Various forms of negotiating
and reinventing modern technologies and ways of living experienced
outside of the west is now being brought to improve the western
and developed world. And Siena is one of those laboratories.
Marjetica Potrc, Siena: Urban Agriculture, 2003
Fontebranda, Siena
Project for Arte all’Arte 2003
Photo Ela Bialkowska, view of the installation
Marjetica Potrc, Siena: Urban Agriculture, 2003
Fontebranda, Siena
Project for Arte all’Arte 2003
Photo Ela Bialkowska, view of the installation
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