12. 10. 2026 from 11am
Faculty of Architecture, University of Montenegro in Podgorica, Monte Negro
PhD candidate at the Department of Fine Arts at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM) and architect, Savka Marenić, will give a lecture and lead a workshop at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Montenegro in Podgorica. Her contribution will take place as part of the course Architectural Workshop, led by assistant professor Ema Alihodžić Jašarović, PhD, and teaching assistant Nemanja Milićević, MArch.
What turns a space into a place?
Before a stone becomes part of a façade, it passes through someone's hands. They carry it to the site, rub it smooth, turn it over and over, press it into the mortar, step back to see how it sits, pull it out, and try another. They – the people whose hands build, place, adjust, and remake – may never know that this small bodily moment of hesitation, this half-second of doubt, will shape how we remember the place. But the stone's story doesn't start at the building site. It might once have been part of a wall we played against as children, or the backdrop of a first date. It might have been the tabletop where our mothers and grandmothers kneaded bread. A material never enters architecture empty. It arrives with its own biography, which folds over ours and slowly becomes part of it. The philosopher Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter, calls this thing-power: the quiet agency of things to shape us, just as we shape them.
In the Tell-Tale Material workshop, students will treat a material not as a technical sample but as a site of memory and a narrative space. Using docufiction as our method, each group will write a short story or dialogue that adds a new page to the material's diary, while thinking about material ecology, sustainability, and coexistence beyond an exclusively human perspective. The aim is to use narrative as a method of understanding the material and its architecture differently.
Bio:
Savka Marenić is an architect, artist, and researcher from Montenegro, based in Prague. Her practice connects architecture and art through site-specific performative interventions, writing, pedagogy, and participatory formats, in both public and gallery spaces. She is currently a PhD student in artistic research at the Department of Fine Art at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM). Her research explores how fieldwork and site-specific performative interventions can create conditions for new spatial narratives and shared experiences, and how these narratives can foster different relationships to place, serve as tools of critique, and disrupt established ways of managing, planning, and perceiving it. She is the author of the urban speculative fiction book Whispers of the Valley (Šepoty údolí, 2026), set in Prague's Nusle district. As an architect, she works at the Prague studio Amulet architekti. She has collaborated with institutions and galleries in Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and New York. Her writing has been published in ERA21, EARCH, Protocole (Berlin) magazines and UMPRUM online platform.
www.savkamarenic.com
