Agency for Situated Stories
An architect, artist, and researcher from Montenegro, based between Prague and Budva, working at the intersection of architecture and art through performative, engaged, site-specific interventions, writing, pedagogy, and participatory formats in both public and gallery settings.
Savka Marenić graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Montenegro in Podgorica and completed her master’s studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at CTU in Prague. She is currently in the third year of her doctoral studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM) in Prague.
Her practice is based on performative tactile textile interventions, acts of listening, and participatory methods through which Savka explores often overlooked spaces, as well as the voices and stories that remain outside dominant urban narratives.
She has collaborated with numerous galleries, institutions, and schools in Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and the United States. She has presented her work through solo and group exhibitions, artistic residencies, and workshops with organizations and institutions including SJCH (Jindřich Chalupecký Society), Teren (Field for Performing Arts), etc. gallery, Entrance Gallery, MeetFactory, CitySurfer Office, JAM, CAMP, Czech Center in New York, Petrohradská community, VUT, EASA, and Mikser Festival. She has given lectures at the Institute of Arts, the Theatre Institute (IDU), the Art for the City programme in Prague, the Gallery of the Capital City of Prague (GHMP), and the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (VŠMU).
Savka is the author of the book Šepoty údolí (Whispers of the Valley, 2026), a work of urban fiction dedicated to the Nusle Valley in Prague. She writes for architectural and art magazines, including ERA21 (Prague), EARCH, Protocole Magazine (Berlin), as well as UMPRUM’s online publications.
A site-specific spatial practice exploring how storytelling and participatory performative interventions reshape our relationship to place, and how they can build resistance in the face of the environmental crisis.
How do we build a relationship with a place through stories? My practice approaches space not only as a physical structure, but as a field of memory, identity, and collective experience.
Working through tactile, textile interventions, listening, and collective work, I explore spaces that are often overlooked: places whose voices remain outside dominant urban narratives, or that are disappearing, transforming, and left unheard. In times of environmental crisis, these spaces are often the first to vanish, and their stories the first to be forgotten. Performative interventions, participation, and shared experience become tools for reading space differently — for surfacing the stories and relationships that shape how we inhabit a place, and for imagining what remains possible once the ground itself is shifting.
Rather than building, proposing, or inventing alternative worlds, my work and stories are always situated — grown from concrete experiences, from the layers present in a place. I am less interested in imagining what a place could become than in listening closely to what it already holds — and in sharing what that listening teaches: what allows a place to sustain itself, and what possibilities open once its stories are finally heard.
At the core of this work is a question about authorship: who gets to narrate a place, and how can collective, participatory methods open alternative ways of reading and re-reading the city? I see storytelling and participation not only as tools of interpretation, but as forms of resistance — ways of holding on to what is disappearing, and of rebuilding a different relationship to architecture: slower, more attentive, rooted in care and relationships rather than extraction.