year: 2025
place: Prague
concept and intervention: Savka Marenić
photos: Nika Datiashvili
sound design: Jonáš Balcar
collaboration: UMPRUM, Academy of Art and Architecture
What if a neglected public space — a parking lot — became a place for daydreaming?
For one day, a parking lot hidden beneath the Nusle Bridge was transformed into a public space for collective dreaming and listening. A textile installation, accompanied by a subtle soundscape, invited passersby and residents to slow down, lie down, and attune to the space—and to the voices that are usually unheard.
Listening became both an act of care and a quiet gesture of resistance: a way of noticing what neglected, in-between places can offer when we pause long enough to encounter them. After the shared dreaming, participants engaged in creative tasks — workshops, sewing sessions, and collective letter-writing in a shared diary. Together, we imagined how this specific site might be reshaped through our own needs, desires, and practices of care.
This participatory, performative installation is part of Savka’s ongoing artistic doctoral research, which investigates how situated imagination can develop into an educational spatial practice — one that embodies care, enacts resistance, and offers a mode of spatial critique. Through speculative, personal, and collective scenarios, the work opens new ways of understanding space and the relationships that shape it, while challenging dominant modes of use, representation, and governance. The space becomes a site for shared imagination, attentive listening, and collective learning.
The installation also contributes to the development of an upcoming book that blends collective imagination, performative events, narratives, and ecological awareness. Through personal, collective, and more-than-human perspectives, the book invites readers, participants, and residents to engage with overlooked and vulnerable sites in the Nusle Valley, demonstrating how small gestures, spatial elements, imagination, and shared listening can transform the ways we perceive and read public space.
Listening became both an act of care and a quiet gesture of resistance: a way of noticing what neglected, in-between places can offer when we pause long enough to encounter them. After the shared dreaming, participants engaged in creative tasks — workshops, sewing sessions, and collective letter-writing in a shared diary. Together, we imagined how this specific site might be reshaped through our own needs, desires, and practices of care.
This participatory, performative installation is part of Savka’s ongoing artistic doctoral research, which investigates how situated imagination can develop into an educational spatial practice — one that embodies care, enacts resistance, and offers a mode of spatial critique. Through speculative, personal, and collective scenarios, the work opens new ways of understanding space and the relationships that shape it, while challenging dominant modes of use, representation, and governance. The space becomes a site for shared imagination, attentive listening, and collective learning.
The installation also contributes to the development of an upcoming book that blends collective imagination, performative events, narratives, and ecological awareness. Through personal, collective, and more-than-human perspectives, the book invites readers, participants, and residents to engage with overlooked and vulnerable sites in the Nusle Valley, demonstrating how small gestures, spatial elements, imagination, and shared listening can transform the ways we perceive and read public space.
