Combining photographs or everyday vernacular designs, artist Anastasia Savinova aims to illustrate patterns in built environments across major European cities as well as rural countrysides. Her Genius Loci (a play on Genus Loci, or: spirit of place) series illuminates the distinctive details and materials of each place she visits and, set against a regional backdrop of landscapes and waterways.
In some cases, it is colors that serve as unifying factors — in others: building materials and typologies. Each one manages to be at once a singular work of architecture and a montage of quintessential parts.
In a way, her pieces serve act like scrapbooks or memories, combining fragmented portions of travels to countries including Sweden, Germany and Italy. They capture those ineffable qualities usually too hard to fit into a single picture frame.
“In this project I am a flâneur, wandering around, inhaling the spirit of places and trying to visualize it,” she says of her work. “I travel, I observe and document. I take pictures, stare into the windows, watch everyday life – all this helps to build the feeling of the Place.
“Architecture and landscape are visual components of the integral image of the Place, at the same time, this image is inseparably linked with a mentality and a way of life.”
“A House on each collage is composed of many buildings, which are typical for a particular country or city, in their connection with the land and the spirit of the Place.”
