ANASTASIA SAVINOVA

A photographic residency in and around Norrbotten

About the residency
When.
November 2018
Where.  Different places in Norrbotten 
Organizers. Norrbottens museum and ArtNorth
Outcomes. An exhibition at Norrbottens museum in 2019

Website. www.anastasiasavinova.com

Anastasia Savinova, Roadless Encounters_ somewhere in Italian Alps_ where wild Ibex squat mountain refuges

A conversation with the artist

Born near the Ural Mountains in USSR in 1988.
A multi-disciplinary artist, since 2013 she works and lives in Sweden. Her practice spans photography, collage, drawing, text, video, sound, and performance.
With her architectural background, she holds affection to constructing and building. A keen mountain walker, she is deeply moved and inspired by the wilderness. She works both with man-made and natural environment, and embraces phenomenological approach in exploring it.
 
During the residency in Lapland, Savinova will be visiting multiple places in Norrbotten region: towns, villages and mountains and work on her project Genius Loci, where she explores “spirit of the Place”. She will create new artworks for an upcoming show at Norrbottens Museum. Region Norrbotten has appointed 2019 as Cultural Heritage Year, and the project Genius Loci relates to heritages such as buildings and landscape.

In each work Savinova creates a visual archive, where one picture concentrates the essence and the feeling of a visited site. She travels, observes and documents.
City flâneur and mountain walker, she wanders, inhaling the breath of Places and trying to visualize it. Streets and mountain passes, encounters on the road and off-road are a rich source of visual information such as form, color and texture; at the same time they contain something incorporeal.  Ancient Romans called it genius loci – the protective spirit of a place. Each piece in the project is composed of numerous photographs of buildings and landscape forms that are true and authentic for a studied area. These works become keepers of the memory and the spirit of the Place.

Anastasia Savinova, Genius loci / NO / Bergen