year: 2025
place: Prague
concept and intervention: Savka Marenić
photos: Nika Datiashvili
sound design: Jonáš Balcar
collaboration: UMPRUM, Academy of Art and Architecture
Lectors: Adina Voldrábová, Aneta Bočková, Tereza Melková, Milena Raičević, Jasmína Lustigová, Savka Marenić
What if a neglected public space became a place of listening, imagination, and care? What happens when a parking lot turns into a public space for dreaming?
For one day, a parking lot hidden under Nusle Bridge was transformed into a public space for collective dreaming and listening. The textile installation,
accompanied by an audio story and soundscape, invited passersby and inhabitants to slow down, lie down, and listen to the space, to themselves, and to the subtle voices that usually remain unheard.
Listening became a way of care, and a gesture of resistance, a way of noticing what these neglected and “weird” places can offer when we pause long enough to hear them.
After the shared dreaming, participants continued with creative tasks: workshops, sewing sessions, and writing letters to the Fabric in their collective diary. Together, we imagined how this particular space could be transformed to meet our own needs, wishes, and gestures of care.
This participatory, performative installation is part of Savka’s ongoing artistic research, where she explores how fiction can transform into a performative method, a practice of care, an act of resistance, and a form of spatial critique. Through speculative and collective scenarios, she opens up new ways of understanding space and the relationships that shape it, while simultaneously questioning dominant modes of its use, representation, and governance. In her work, space becomes a site of shared imagination, listening, learning, and play. It follows the project Whisper in the Valley, an interactive audio walk that used the fiction of the magical fabric to uncover hidden stories of the Nusle Valley — a collective walk with performers, followed by an audio story and field recordings.
The installation is also part of the development of an upcoming book that blends collective imagination, performative events, narrative, and ecological awareness. Through personal, collective, and more-than-human perspectives, the book invites readers, participants, and residents to engage with overlooked and vulnerable spaces in the Nusle Valley. It demonstrates how small gestures, imagination, and shared listening can transform our perception of these places.
After the shared dreaming, participants continued with creative tasks: workshops, sewing sessions, and writing letters to the Fabric in their collective diary. Together, we imagined how this particular space could be transformed to meet our own needs, wishes, and gestures of care.
This participatory, performative installation is part of Savka’s ongoing artistic research, where she explores how fiction can transform into a performative method, a practice of care, an act of resistance, and a form of spatial critique. Through speculative and collective scenarios, she opens up new ways of understanding space and the relationships that shape it, while simultaneously questioning dominant modes of its use, representation, and governance. In her work, space becomes a site of shared imagination, listening, learning, and play. It follows the project Whisper in the Valley, an interactive audio walk that used the fiction of the magical fabric to uncover hidden stories of the Nusle Valley — a collective walk with performers, followed by an audio story and field recordings.
The installation is also part of the development of an upcoming book that blends collective imagination, performative events, narrative, and ecological awareness. Through personal, collective, and more-than-human perspectives, the book invites readers, participants, and residents to engage with overlooked and vulnerable spaces in the Nusle Valley. It demonstrates how small gestures, imagination, and shared listening can transform our perception of these places.
