Marjetica Potrč – Renewing Knowledge Production at Floating University Berlin and Haus der Statistik

In 2018, during the first year of Floating University Berlin (FUB), the students in my participatory practice class
Design for the Living World, at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HfBK), helped to create the FUB programe
by working on rainwater and basin-water filtration projects. While Floating University was responding to global
warming by highlighting practices that disengage from the anthropocentric relationship between humans and
nature, a separate effort, the Haus der Statistik project, responded to the influx of refugees in Berlin in 2015 by
focusing on cooperative neighborhood development run by a civic society coalition. Both projects have become
symbols of ways to shape the city for the common good through collaborative models of knowledge production
and exchange.

Marjetica Potrč

Marjetica Potrč is an acknowledged Slovene artist and architect. Her interdisciplinary practice includes on-site
projects, research, architectural case studies, and a series of drawings. Her work documents and interprets
contemporary architectural practice, participatory design and sustainable solutions and the ways people live
together. From 2011 to 2018, she was a professor of social practice at the University of Fine Arts/HFBK in
Hamburg, where she taught Design for the Living World, a class on participatory practices. Marjetica has
received numerous grants and awards; In 2018, she was one of the artists presented in the group
exhibition Eco-Visionaries at Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden.