What Brings You Here?
Antea Divić (1992) is an architect from Croatia who graduated from TU Delft in the Netherlands within the Architecture Philosophy and Theory Chair. Her graduation project, Machinic Magic, explored how architecture can produce conditions for play as a transformative social and spatial force.
Working across architecture, research, filmmaking, and collective practice, using different media to investigate how space is produced, inhabited, and remembered. Her projects take the form of buildings, competition proposals, exhibitions, publications, and films, and have been developed and exhibited internationally, including in Rotterdam, Chicago, London, Venice, Rijeka, and Zagreb.
She is the founder of post studio, an independent post-disciplinary practice based in Zagreb. The practice focuses on experimentation and collaboration through interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches.
Selected as one of fifty international participants in the inaugural Biennale College Architettura (2023), she became part of the Monsters of Radical Empathy collective. Each participant created a personal monster, together producing a collective film exploring empathy, care, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world, later exhibited at the University of Greenwich in London.
Expanding her architectural practice through film, she completed Restart's School of Documentary Film in 2026 and directed her first short documentary, treating filmmaking as a way of producing architectural knowledge through space, memory, and everyday life.
Although over the years her work has taken her across disciplines and contexts, her practice and thinking remain rooted in the small coastal village where she grew up.
Architecture is usually represented through drawings, photographs, and completed buildings. Yet its most meaningful qualities emerge only after people move in. Everyday routines, memories, adaptations, and relationships continue to shape buildings long after construction ends.
My proposal explores filmmaking as an architectural research method.
My first documentary, How to use your home, investigates a row housing development in Zagreb designed in 1970 by architect Anamarija Jelinčić Šemenčić. Rather than analyzing the project through plans or architectural history alone, the film asks how decades of everyday life have shaped the architecture itself. Same walls, different lives. Through observation, conversations, archival research, and time spent with residents, the camera became a tool for uncovering forms of spatial knowledge that drawings cannot capture.
The project transformed the way I understand architectural practice. I no longer see film as a medium for documenting architecture, but as a way of producing architectural knowledge, revealing how buildings are continuously rewritten through care, conflict, memory, maintenance, and everyday inhabitation.
At the same time, filmmaking expands who gets to produce architectural knowledge. Rather than speaking only to specialists, it creates a shared language rooted in stories and lived experience. I am interested in filmmaking as a collaborative mode of inquiry, where architectural knowledge is produced with the people who inhabit a place rather than extracted from them.
I see How to use your home as the first chapter of an ongoing research practice. Rather than organizing future films around typologies or scales, each chapter will investigate a spatial condition such as belonging, care, memory, seasonality, refuge, or coexistence. The settings may range from coastal settlements to rural landscapes or spaces of shelter, but the research will always begin with a human condition rather than a building type.