Marjetica Potrč and Ooze Architects
Of Soil and Water: the King’s Cross
Pond Club
Opens May 2015 for approximately two years
Lewis Cubitt Park
King’s Cross
London
UK
www.kingscross.co.uk
Vimeo / Twitter / #KXPC / #BatheInArt
An important piece of art in use by Ooze Architects (Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg) and artist Marjetica Potrč has been installed within a working construction site area of London’s King’s Cross. Titled Of Soil and Water: the King’s Cross Pond Club, the piece is the UK’s first ever man-made fresh water public bathing pond and it encourages visitors to enter the water and participate in the installation as a piece of experiential art.
Architects Ooze and artist Potrč have been collaborating on projects since 2008. “We wanted to explore the concept of water, something which is often hidden away in urban landscapes. In this particular project, the juxtaposition of something so natural in an urban environment was a very important idea for us,” said Sylvain Hartenberg.
The artist Marjetica Potrč said of the work, “We want to understand people’s influence upon nature but also our balance with nature.”
About the King’s Cross arts programme
Derived, inspired and developed from the 2006 S106 site agreement; and supported by the KCCLP Arts Advisory Panel (with representation from Allies and Morrison, The British Council, Camden Arts Centre, Central Saint Martins, London Borough of Camden Arts, Robert Townshend Architects and Tate Modern).
To date, King’s Cross has hosted the showing of High Wire by Catherine Yass, curated by Artangel in the German Gymnasium and Scattered Crowd by William Forsythe, curated by Sadlers Wells, in the Midlands Good shed. King’s Cross supported the performance of In Time by the London Sinfonietta and ran an Arts Council England residency programme which supported the artists Ellie Reid during 2008/09 and Graham Hudson in 2009/10. Subsequently, the first three-year curated programme, RELAY, was set up by the curators Michael Pinsky and Stephanie Delcroix in 2010. Three projects were delivered from 2011 to 2013: Jacque Rival’s IFO, Richard Wentworth and Gruppe’s Black Maria and Felice Varini’s Across the Buildings.
About the artist:
Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana and Berlin. Potrč’s artworks have been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas, including at the Venice Biennial (1993, 2003, 2009) and the São Paulo Biennial (1996, 2006), and are shown regularly at the Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin. Her many community-based on-site projects include Dry Toilet (Caracas, 2003), The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour (Stedelijk Goes West, Amsterdam, 2009), The Commons Project (Yes Naturally, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands, 2013) and The Wind Lift (Folkestone Triennial, 2014). Since 2011, she has been a professor at the University of Fine Arts/HFBK in Hamburg. Students of her course “Design for the Living World” develop participatory design projects during long-term residencies such as the Soweto Project (Soweto, SA, 2014). She has also been a visiting professor at a number of other institutions, including the MIT (2005) and IUAV in Venice (2008, 2010). Potrč has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship at The New School in New York (2007).
www.potrc.org / www.designforthelivingworld.com
About the architects:
Ooze is an international design practice operating in the fields of art and architecture, based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and founded by Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg in 2003. Ooze combines an elaborate understanding of natural, ecological processes with technological expertise and deep insights into the social-cultural behavior of users of the built environment. Each project, each art installation, building, public space or urban structure is both, the product of a way of living and an idea of adapting this way of living to achieve a more social and ecological sustainability. Work of Ooze has been realized in Europe and Asia and was exhibited during several international cultural events, among them the Venice Biennial in 2012 and a solo exhibition at Studio-X in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2014. Ooze has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Dutch Basis Prix de Rome for Architecture in 2006.
Press contact
Rosie Cade: T +44 20 3664 0256 / rosie.cade [at] argentllp.co.uk
