Yiddishland Pavilion Sukkah - Audio guide in Yiddish
Text: Esther (Sala-manca) | Voice: Edit Kuper | Recording: Joao Delgado. Post: Amir Bolzman. Thanks to Miriam Thrin.
Yiddishland Pavilion Sukkah - Audio guide (English version)
Text: Esther (Sala-manca) | Voice: Lea Mauas | Recording: Joao Delgado. Post: Amir Bolzman. Thanks to Sarmishta Subramanian.
If the national pavilion is the permanent structure that represents a country, then the Yiddishland Pavilion is the sukkah. A sukkah (pl. sukkot) is a temporary hut built during the Jewish festival of Sukkot. According to biblical commandment, Jews dwell in these fragile structures for seven days to remember the shelters their ancestors lived in after the exodus from Egypt. Constructed each autumn after the harvest, a sukkah is both a ritual dwelling and an act of remembrance—a practice of living in impermanence that commemorates migration, displacement, and survival.
A sukkah is a symbolic architecture, sacred because of its fragility. It functions as shelter and exposure at once, balancing rootedness and uprootedness, permanence and transience. In contemporary contexts, sukkot intervene in the urban landscape like delicate cracks in the solidity of the city. They recall unsettled notions of home while resonating with urgent questions of housing, belonging, and collective tragedy. A sukkah is a temporary monument, a memorial in transit, and at times a political provocation.
The Yiddishland Pavilion is not merely contained in a sukkah—it is a sukkah. This means the pavilion can exist wherever one is built, multiplying across places and contexts. With this in mind, Sala-manca Group recorded a guided tour in Yiddish, designed to be heard inside a sukkah. In this way, each sukkah in which the tour is streamed becomes a branch of the Venice Biennale—where the temporary Yiddishland Pavilion performs while being listened to. The artwork, the structure, are the Yiddish words.
(Since international pavilions are usually multilingual, an English version of the tour is also available as a second track).
Maria Veits and Yevgeni Fixs, curators of the Yiddishland Pavilion
With the kind support of ARTIS.