What this film tells
Shot on Super 8 and hand-developed in caffenol at the British School at Rome, Rise and Fall of a Temple brings together ancient ruins and a contemporary performance where a temple is built, assembled, and allowed to collapse.
Why it matters
Rise and Fall of a Temple matters because it does something rare: it uses the most tactile, handmade filmmaking process imaginable (Super 8, caffenol, physical development) to ask one of the largest questions art can pose. What remains when an empire falls? And what do we build from what's left? Eva Sajovic brings to this question a personal urgency. Born in Slovenia, she experienced Yugoslavia's disintegration firsthand, the collapse of one system and the rapid, often violent construction of another. That lived knowledge gives the film a weight that goes beyond the aesthetic. When the temple in the gardens of the British School at Rome is assembled and then allowed to fall, it is not a metaphor invented for the camera. It is a gesture shaped by experience. The film is also significant for what it represents institutionally: the first work produced under the UAL Fine Art Research Fellowship at the British School at Rome, one of Europe's most important centres of interdisciplinary research. That a film this quiet, this analogue, this deliberately slow was born inside an institution of that scale says something about the kind of art that matters now.
Statement
I am a Slovene artist working across live art, installation and social practice — with a focus on material and social transformation.
My work is influenced by my personal experience of Yugoslavia’s disintegration during my teenage years, followed by the fast transition from a socialist to a capitalist state. This formative experience drives my efforts to understand and navigate the neoliberal world I inhabit.
My practice often involves large-scale participatory projects, using collaborative methods to move individuals beyond passive spectatorship into active roles in fostering social change. I make knitted, ceramic and mixed-media objects that act as props, activators or tools — supporting my interventions and helping refine ideas during research.
Eva Sajovic
Biography
Eva Sajovic (b. 1976) is a Slovene artist who lives and works in London. She graduated with a First Class BA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins (2007) and completed an MA in Academic Practice in Art and Design at the University of the Arts London (2018). She also holds a Law Degree from the University of Ljubljana (1999) and an LLM in Art Law from Utrecht University (2001). She is a Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.
Her work has been widely exhibited. In 2026 she held the solo exhibition Rise and Fall of a Temple at Chelsea Space, London; her work was included in Musa at Casa Italia, Triennale Milano, and she held a solo show at m2 gallery, London. In 2025 she held a Fine Art Fellowship at the British School at Rome; in 2024 she was awarded Developing Your Creative Practice by Arts Council England.
Recent highlights include a major commission for the British Textile Biennial 2023, a solo exhibition at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning (2022), a retrospective at Gallery Božidar Jakac, Slovenia (2021), and All Rise For The Planet: 2030 Show Trial at Tate Modern (2019).
Focus on the work
In 2024, Eva Sajovic travelled to Rome as the first ever recipient of the UAL Fine Art Research Fellowship at the British School at Rome. She went to study the systems and structures of the Roman Empire. What she found was not only ancient history but a mirror: the patterns of power she had watched collapse as a teenager in Yugoslavia, repeated across centuries, embedded in stone, woven into the fabric of institutions that still stand.
Rise and Fall of a Temple is the project that grew from that encounter. It places ancient imperial systems side by side with the contemporary "pillars" of modern society and asks how the ruins of empires might be reimagined as tools for empathy, renewal and collective dialogue. The work unfolds across multiple dimensions: sculpture, knitted tapestries, tufted wall and floor works, embroidery, ceramics, and a short film. Stone and iron are transformed into wool and thread. Warriors carry mops instead of swords. Tapestries are disarticulated, figures are softened, and the monumental is remade in materials that can be touched, held, undone.
At the centre of the project is the film Rise and Fall of a Temple, shot on Super 8 at the British School at Rome, hand-developed in caffenol and later digitised. It brings together footage of ancient Roman ruins with a performance in which a procession of messengers carries fragments of a temple through the gardens of the BSR, assembling it on the porch before allowing it to collapse. The film reflects on notions of "before and after": what a structure looks like in the moment before it falls, and what the ground looks like after.
Sajovic's path to this work is unusual. She trained first as a lawyer, earning a Law Degree from the University of Ljubljana (1999) and an LLM in Art Law from Utrecht University (2001), before turning to art: a First Class BA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins (2007) and an MA in Academic Practice from UAL (2018). The passage from law to art is not a detour. It is the foundation: someone who studied the formal structures of power and then chose to dismantle them through material and social practice. She is a Senior Lecturer in BA Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, and her work is held in the Arts Council Collection and the Bauhaus-Weimar collection.
The exhibition Rise and Fall of a Temple was on view at Chelsea Space, Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), from 6 February to 17 July 2026. Unfolding across three acts, with new artworks added after each public-facing event, the show grew and changed shape over its five-month run. A research symposium with academics, historians and astrologers took place in April. A public participatory performance, in which audiences physically built and deconstructed a temple at Chelsea College of Arts' Parade Ground, was held in May. A publication launch followed in June. Throughout, the audience was invited not to observe but to take part: to become active collaborators in the construction and the collapse.
Recent exhibitions include Musa at Casa Italia, Triennale Milano (2026), a solo show at m2 gallery, London (2026), a major commission for the British Textile Biennial (2023), and All Rise For The Planet: 2030 Show Trial at Tate Modern (2019).
Notes — From the Lab
A film shot on Super 8, hand-developed in caffenol, and now finding a second life on a streaming platform. Eva Sajovic's Rise and Fall of a Temple begins with the ruins of Rome and ends with a cardboard temple collapsing on the porch of the British School. The most fragile medium for the most monumental subject.
Read articleCredits
Key creative roles and featured participants connected to the film.
Crew
With thanks to
Ash Tower for help with production of the temple Ady Cousins for help with developing Super8 film in caffenol With thanks to participating Fellows Can Gun Cathie Pilkington Jack Killick James Drysdale Miller Joe Bates Matthew Fox
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