PROJECTS:
Moth on the Window
Field Notes
Whispers of the Valley (book)
Whisper of the Valley (audiowalk)
Dreaming under the bridge
Should I take my shoes off?
Diary: Threads of Care
Honestly, it’s not just a Room
Trigger Witness
House Signs
Home again
When no one is around
Collective dreaming
Sewing, stitching, knitting
Puppet show: Behind the scenes
Report about Public Spaces
Festival Waiting for a Change
Our yard
Mystery of Ms.Warden
WRITINGS & LECTURES:
City as Script
Whispers of the Valley
Between Layers of Space
Weaving a Narrative of Space
Fiction as a gesture of Care
Urbanism and (not)Research
Landscape (Ex)Change
Earch_On Collaboration
Exhibition: Moth on the Window
year: 2026
place: etc gallery, Prague
artistic collaboration: Pamela
book design: Bára Růžičková
sound production: Jonáš Balcar
exhibition graphics: Nela Klímová
curatorial collaboration: Nela Klajbanová, Tereza Vinklárková
exhibition architecture: Savka Marenić
Technical support: Samuel Stano
Photos of the installation: Jan Kolský
Photos of the vernissage: Lucie Sasínová
Special Thanks: Nika Datiashvili, Dominik Lang, Johana Lomová, Sára Märc
“The train stopped between stations. No announcement. First came fear. Then something indistinct, a barely audible hum. Some people began to smile without quite knowing why. When the metro arrived at the station, the passengers stepped out unhurriedly. They started dancing around lampposts, hopping over curbs, peering into bushes, and circling the pillars again and again. Steam rose from the ventilation shaft. Was it a glitch? A brief nap? Or something for which we have no name?”
Savka Marenić’s solo exhibition is based on her book Whispers of the Valley (Šepoty údolí) and her artistic doctoral research, which explores how situated storytelling can become a spatial intervention, an invitation to participation, and a tool of critical pedagogy. It is inspired by moments when the everyday reality of the city subtly shifts from its ordinary logic, revealing layers of relationships that usually remain hidden. Such “glitches,” which Marenić also deliberately creates in order to draw attention to gaps within urban planning, do not merely disrupt the established order of space but open up new ways of reading and imagining it.
Using the Nusle Valley as a case study, the artist brings together field research, performative situations, and collective experience. Shaped by the monumental infrastructure of the Nusle Bridge and the city highway, the valley is a site of contrasts between planned functionality, everyday use, and layers of local memory. Through speculative fiction rooted in personal and collective experiences and observations, Marenić creates space for listening to what usually remains at the margins of the city’s image.
The exhibition intervention invites inhabitants and passers-by to slow down and explore what the gaps and cracks in the textile installation reveal. The installation is made from recycled textiles that Savka has incorporated into a patchwork composition. In each gap of the textile, there is hidden some story, a letter written together with the inhabitants or the soundtrack recorded in the field in collaboration with artist Jonáš Balcar.
The participatory installation offered public readings from Whispers of the Valley, and a suburban day camp for children. Together, these activities create an open narrative about the Nusle Valley — its familiar and overlooked places, the possibilities of experiencing space collectively, and the ways in which the city can be narrated anew.
Savka Marenić’s solo exhibition is based on her book Whispers of the Valley (Šepoty údolí) and her artistic doctoral research, which explores how situated storytelling can become a spatial intervention, an invitation to participation, and a tool of critical pedagogy. It is inspired by moments when the everyday reality of the city subtly shifts from its ordinary logic, revealing layers of relationships that usually remain hidden. Such “glitches,” which Marenić also deliberately creates in order to draw attention to gaps within urban planning, do not merely disrupt the established order of space but open up new ways of reading and imagining it.
Using the Nusle Valley as a case study, the artist brings together field research, performative situations, and collective experience. Shaped by the monumental infrastructure of the Nusle Bridge and the city highway, the valley is a site of contrasts between planned functionality, everyday use, and layers of local memory. Through speculative fiction rooted in personal and collective experiences and observations, Marenić creates space for listening to what usually remains at the margins of the city’s image.
The exhibition intervention invites inhabitants and passers-by to slow down and explore what the gaps and cracks in the textile installation reveal. The installation is made from recycled textiles that Savka has incorporated into a patchwork composition. In each gap of the textile, there is hidden some story, a letter written together with the inhabitants or the soundtrack recorded in the field in collaboration with artist Jonáš Balcar.
The participatory installation offered public readings from Whispers of the Valley, and a suburban day camp for children. Together, these activities create an open narrative about the Nusle Valley — its familiar and overlooked places, the possibilities of experiencing space collectively, and the ways in which the city can be narrated anew.
Photo credits: Jan Kolský
Photo credits: Lucie Sasínová
year: 2026
place: Prague
concept and text: Savka Marenić
sound design: Jonáš Balcar
illustration: Pamela
graphic: Bára Růžičková
published by UMPRUM publishing house
place: Prague
concept and text: Savka Marenić
sound design: Jonáš Balcar
illustration: Pamela
graphic: Bára Růžičková
published by UMPRUM publishing house
The book is accompanied by illustrations by artist Pamela Kuťáková, while the graphic design of the publication was created by Bára Růžičková. Each copy includes a QR code linking to a sound recording created in collaboration with artist Jonáš Balcar.
Each soundtrack emerges from a specific overlooked place in the Nusle Valley: the traffic island on Nusle Bridge, the empty concrete fountain, the parking lot beneath the bridge, patches of urban woodland, the Botič stream, railway tracks, tunnels, spatial fractures of the landscape. It begins with a field recording of the site's soundscape and gradually unfolds into a composition that opens the space to another imaginary. Rather than identifying locations, the poetic titles evoke their atmosphere, experiences, and memories.
The composed soundscape of the valley:
year: 2024
place: Prague
concept,script and direction: Savka Marenić
costumes: Savka Marenić
video: Nika Datiaschvili
sound design: Jonáš Richter, Jonáš Balcar, Nikola Janković
performers: Nikola Janković, Gabriela Veselá, Milena Raičević
photos: Adéla Vosičková
collaboration: Umění pro město, GHMP
A performative intervention unfolds around the Vyšehrad metro station and the Nusle Bridge, gradually revealing the valley’s hidden non-places while rediscovering its presence. Nusle Valley becomes the setting for an immersive audio walk — a space for listening and re-perceiving the environment. The Nusle Bridge, together with its unseen in-between spaces, transforms into a site of shared imagination.
Whisper in the Valley explores the performative qualities of public transit non-spaces, offering an alternative perspective on space. Through speculative narrative, the project highlights gestures of care and fosters new connections to a place deeply shaped by the physical and urban impact of the Nusle Bridge, as well as by its psychological and social implications. While the bridge connects the city, it is also associated with personal loss and ongoing transformation; its history is linked to numerous suicides and broader social changes that have left a lasting imprint on the valley.
The walk is enriched by original music, field recordings, and costumes that expand the narrative and stimulate the audience’s imagination and interpretation of the story.
The installation also contributes to the development of an upcoming book that blends collective imagination, performative events, narrative, and ecological awareness. Through different perspectives, the book invites readers, participants, and residents to engage with overlooked and vulnerable spaces in the Nusle Valley, demonstrating how small gestures, imagination, and shared creation can transform the ways we perceive these places.
made by: Nika Datiashvili
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 storytelling 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.
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 storytelling 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.
year: 2025
place: Prague
curator: Ján Gajdušek
architecture: Savka Marenić
artists: Jan Kostohryz, Alice Nikitinová, Hana Puchová
Graphic Design: Jan Matoušek
Production: Nikol Hoangová
collaboration: Meetfactory gallery
photos: Savka Marenić and Jan Kolský
The exhibition Should I take my shoes off? at MeetFactory gallery, transforms the industrial space into an imaginary apartment unit and, through the works of Alice Nikitinová, Hana Puchová, and Jan Kostohryz, explores home as a mutable stage where the material inventory, spatial layout, and gestures of everyday objects create a familiar field of situations oscillating between shared closeness and retreat into solitude.
Each artwork assumes a dual role: it shapes the factual, material structure of the flat while simultaneously forming its “human” layer, where relational scenarios unfold—recognisable to anyone who has ever shared a kitchen table, savoured holiday quiet, or endured the chaos of moving. In their still lifes and situational scenes, the selected painters map—at a slow, voyeuristic tempo—shared human rituals of care, memory, and intimacy.
The exhibition thus seeks to present visitors with a space that feels deceptively familiar yet unexpectedly new, where nostalgia intertwines with contemporaneity, the ephemerality of time with a longing for permanence, and subtle references arise to the everyday humorous situations we have all experienced, or are currently experiencing, in our own dwellings.
