A Dialogue Between Architecture, History, and the Body
KNOW NATION presents Space of Becoming, a cinematic dance work that enters the haunted interior of Dom Penzionera—an architectural masterpiece conceived as a home for care, dignity, and community. Completed in 1992 and honored with the BORBA Award, Yugoslavia’s highest architectural accolade, the building was meant to serve the most vulnerable: the elderly and those living with dementia.
But it never opened its doors.
War shattered its purpose before it could begin.
What was built as a sanctuary became an empty monument—its walls scarred by bullet and shellfire, slowly reclaimed by nature, and quietly abandoned for more than three decades.
A Story of Care Interrupted
Dom Penzionera was designed as a vibrant testament to Sarajevo’s late-20th-century architectural ambition: bold colors, eclectic forms, postmodern playfulness—a kaleidoscope of possibility. It embodied a spirit of resilience carried from the city’s pre-war identity: a commitment to protect, to uplift, to care.
Instead, it remained uninhabited, becoming a symbol of unrealized promise, a gentle giant caught between preservation and erasure.
Movement as Witness
Space of Becoming transforms this silent architecture into a vessel for storytelling.
Director Rebeka Bratož Gornik and choreographer-performer Daniel Proietto enter the building with a small ensemble of emerging performers from the Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo. Through contemporary movement, presence, and attentive listening, they trace the emotional landscape of the structure—its fractures, its beauty, its ghosts.
The dancers do not “restore” the building.
They listen to it.
They inhabit its wounds, breathe into its forgotten promises, and allow its history to speak through their bodies.
What emerges is a choreography shaped by absence: an architecture of care that was never fulfilled, and yet continues to resonate.
A Cinematic Elegy for What Remains
Shot with atmospheric cinematography by Martin Klabus, and enveloped in an original score by Oskar Longyka & Tobija Hudnik, the film captures the tension between decay and transformation. Drone images reveal the monumental scale of the structure; close-ups uncover the fragile textures of time.
This is not a documentary.
It is a requiem.
A meditation.
An invitation to witness how bodies, memory, and built environments shape each other long after history has shifted.
A Collaboration Rooted in Community
Produced by Dani Arhitekture, LIFT Spatial Initiatives, and RBG Film, Space of Becoming honors the legacy of architects Dragan Bijedić and Mladen Gvozden, whose work remains a testament to imagination amid loss.
In bringing this film to KNOW NATION, the team reopens a conversation with a place that was silenced—and invites the viewer to consider what it means for architecture to carry memory, grief, and unrealized care.
Space of Becoming is a reminder that even in ruins, something continues to become.
CREATIVE TEAM
Director & Editor: Rebeka Bratož Gornik
Choreography & Performance: Daniel Proietto
Performers: Anastasija Dunjic, Issa Osmić, Nedim Suve
(Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo — class of Fejzić Emir)
Cinematography: Martin Klabus
Drone: Samir Behnan (SBN HDVC), Tungsten Creatives
Camera Assistant: Muki Bagra
Make-up: Karakondžu Look
Music: Oskar Longyka & Tobija Hudnik
Color: Simon Gosnik
Producers: Dunja Krvavac, Irhana Šehić
Production: Dani Arhitekture & RBG Film
Supported by: LINA Community, Creative Europe, LIFT Spatial Initiatives, Dani Arhitekture
Filmed at: Dom Penzionera, Sarajevo
Co-produced by: KNOW NATION