On Heaven’s Doorsill begins with a family story and opens onto the beliefs surrounding death in rural Romania. Roxana Savin’s grandmother Alexandra lived her entire life in a village governed by seasonal rhythms. In the story Savin recounts, the widowed Alexandra dreamed that her late husband promised to return for her at harvest time. That memory gives the photographs a personal point of departure: the afterlife is approached through inherited stories and everyday rituals rather than abstract doctrine.
Savin’s images move between ordinary surroundings and an unsettling sense of another presence. The publisher connects the project to the Romanian ballad The Ewe, whose shepherd imagines death as a return to nature’s cycle. Remembering the dead can provide comfort, yet it can also make their absence feel unresolved. This tension is central to the book’s psychological landscape. For Savin, a Romanian-born artist based in Switzerland who works with photography and moving image, it also connects personal memory to broader questions of identity and belonging.
Published by dienacht in 2025, the 120-page volume combines English and Romanian texts in a 16.5 by 22 centimetre format. Calin Kruse and Yana Kruse designed and edited it; Future Format in Greece printed and bound the edition of 500. Japanese textured cover paper, two cover cut-outs and exposed thread stitching give the object a pronounced tactile character. The publisher’s photographs show how openings in the cover introduce images before the reader enters the sequence.
For collectors, those physical choices offer a concrete way to consider the relationship between thresholds and remembrance. The book can be read both as a culturally specific account of rural beliefs and as an intimate exploration of how the living continue to address the dead. Its recognition among the ten equal winners of the 2026 Fotobus Library Award provides another route into a work whose interest rests in the meeting of family narrative, photographic atmosphere and book design.
