Yiddishland Pavilion at the 60th Biennale of Venice for Architecture

by Valerie Kabov

Founded in 1895, the Venice Biennale was the Grand Dame of biennales but also a snapshot of Europe at the acme of expansionist nationalism. Just a decade earlier, in 1884, the Berlin conference kickstarted the Scramble for Africa which saw 90% of the continent colonised by European nation states by 1914. Following the order of the classical 19^th century geo-political hierarchies, the progression of the key national pavilions in the Giardini shows Britain presiding at the top, flanked by France and Germany, followed down the hill by Russia and Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Scandinavia.

 

The curator for the  2025 19^th Biennale Architectura, Carlo Ratti, titled the exhibition “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” The central theme is “adaptation,” and it explores how architecture must evolve to respond to a world facing climate change and other pressing challenges. Ratti argues that architecture’s focus must shift from solely “mitigation” to also include “adaptation,” and that this requires drawing on multiple forms of intelligence—natural, artificial, and collective—to rethink the built environment.

The thematic premise, as the majority of responses to it, addresses global environmental dismay and architectural thinking for the past several decades, with official pavilions and collateral events responding to important topics including housing, sustainability, circular economy, and the biosphere.

 

It is then a little surprising in this righteous mix, to encounter The Yiddishland Pavilion, a project that unself-consciously appears at right angles to the zeitgeist. Developed by curators Yevgeniy Fiks and Maria Veits, Yiddishland for the second time disturbs the earnest edifice of the Biennale of Architecture, under the title “Doikeyt”, which in Yiddish means the state of being in a place, ‘hereness’ if you will. Conceived “as an unofficial, interventional project—something that happens at the edge of the Biennale, both within and outside its frame, it is not sanctioned, not announced on the official map, but it moves through the spaces of the Biennale and the city, asserting a kind of counter-presence.”[1] The ‘Pavilion’ disrupts the mainstream in a way that is very necessary even if in a counterintuitive way.

 

To focus on a language as a foundational entry point at a time when everyone else is looking at the relationship with the natural world and our role and survival with it as a species, may feel somehow ephemeral. And yet it goes to the heart of the project of coexistence and adaptability philosophically, looking at the very human cause rather than symptoms of human impact on the world.

 

Yiddish like other Judeo-languages, developed during Jewish diasporan experience over the past two millennia, emerged in Germany and later Eastern Europe as response to living in societies where German was the lingua franca for engaging with the world while being excluded from it. It became a linguistic hybrid, written in the Hebrew alphabet as this was the only alphabet accessible to the Jews educationally and used to write, effectively a lexicon built on German, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Hungarian etc. based on German grammar. This very distinctive formulation arising from a place of exclusion is a form of adaptation to an environment in conditions of extreme discomfort, finding a way to thrive. Unlike pidgin and patois, Yiddish built itself up over centuries as a fully-fledged language with an independent sophisticated culture rich in literature, theatre, songs and poetry as well as philosophy, journalism and political thought. Far from being limited to serving its small native speaking community, Yiddish cultural output has had a much broader reach. We cannot speak about philosophy in 20^th century without considering Martin Buber, or literature without the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer or comedy without the Marx Brothers (who started in Yiddish theatre).

 

The legitimacy of Yiddish as a vehicle of cultural growth is unequivocal. Equally so, its ability to traverse continents as it did with migration of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe to North America, South America and Southern Africa at the end of the 19^th century, is a testament to its adaptability and resilience.

 

In doing so, it created a cultural precedent for multiculturalism before the term was even a twinkle in the eye of a late 20^th century politicians dealing with multiple migrations. To borrow a term from Anna Gordon, it is a primary example of creolisation which exemplifies cultural hybridity: Yiddish became a marker of neither German nor Jewish identity but a new, diasporic synthesis.[2]

 

In some ways the physical space for Yiddish and thus Yiddishland exists almost like negative space in art, a state of being which articulates and critiques the positive space or dominant narrative, whatever that may be. To use a conventional and necessarily limited binary narrative it is the space of being other, with Jews conceptually being the original ‘other’ in Western thought and discourse. This is certainly part of the curatorial perspective.

 

According to Fiks “the space of Yiddish expands and contracts, moving between negative and positive spaces, as history twists and turns and as the notion of otherness is reassessed at every step…and Yiddish and the Yiddishland Pavilion are fundamentally very much about otherness. I think this position has been, unfortunately, quite constant.”

 

Fiks sees Yiddish as “a defensive language and culture that never attached itself to a state apparatus or system of repression, Yiddish is always in the “current political climate”—its political position is doing the Yiddish thing. Although there are many forces—mostly on the Left, but not only—that would like to instrumentalize Yiddish culture, Yiddish has experienced a lot of politics in its lifetime: from national(ist) liberation movements to religious wars, starting from its inception in the Rhine Valley at the turn of the second millennium. In many of these movements, it unfortunately (and mostly unwillingly) participated.

So I think Yiddish’s response to current events is always about insisting on alternatives, non-hegemony, imagination, and resisting being mobilized for someone else’s purpose. Being “other” is its historical condition—it has been that way for a long, long time.”

This positioning remains as relevant today as it has been for centuries.

 

Maria Veits similarly sees the role of The Yiddishland Pavilion as one embracing the discomfort, intellectualism  and physicality of Yiddish occupying “space obliquely—through absence, through refusal, through sidelong presence. “That sense of otherness—being out of place, or never quite belonging to the dominant narrative—is not just represented in the projects, it’s performed through their very structure and placement,” she says.

Of these Constantin Boym’s Wandering Pavilion[3] is the most poignantly poetic and conceptually resolved project. A performer dressed as a human billboard with a mirrored surface is instructed to move through the Biennale and streets of Venice, prompting unplanned and unsanctioned encounters. Veits notes that “For the first three days, no one stopped her. On the fourth, the guards asked her to leave. That small act of border enforcement became part of the work—a reminder of how fragile and conditional our presence in these spaces can be.”[4]

 

This simple gesture of reflection, perhaps referencing the Euromaidan mirror protest in  Ukraine in 2013, when demonstrators faced off with pro-Russia government police forces with torso sized mirrors[5] makes the similar point that Yiddish is a constant mirror to the societies it lives with for better or for worse.

 

Other Yiddishland projects focus on the idea of finding an essence of permanence in the transient and ephemeral. In Daniel Toretsky’s Der Vegele Fun Doikeyt, a modular improvised sculpture and musical instrument, carried and assembled out of a suitcase, whimsically humorous and self-reflexively ironic, like Yiddish is forced and chooses its adapted form as it moves from one location to another. Free will and necessity are not always at odds it seems to suggest.

The Yiddishland Sukkah Pavilion by Sala-Manca collective (Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman) is a temporary structure like those that Jews are instructed to build every year and to dwell in, while celebrating Sukkot, the harvest festival commemorating the life of Jews in the Sinai desert after the Exodus from Egypt. The Yiddishland Sukkah Pavilion is not only a structure—it is a way of thinking architecturally. “It resists permanence and invites renewal. It is a movable Jerusalem, a foldable, elastic pavilion that can be reimagined each year with new materials, interpretations, and meanings of what a homeland might be.”[6]

 

Finally Camp Doikeyt by Julia Hedges and G. Laster envisions a children’s summer camp, a common phenomenon in American Jewish culture, particularly associated with Upstate New York but in this iteration one with no fixed location. Rather it develops as a series of sites across Venice, assembling and disassembling as an architectural concept and process in itself, its purpose collective and environmentally responsive.

 

Venice while traditionally associated with Sephardi Jewish heritage and another Judeo language, Ladino, has a rich Yiddish history, defeating yet again reductionist, divide and conquer external narratives of Jewish diasporan history. Thus the first Yiddish book printing was done in Venice, because in the Middle Ages Venice was a center of Jewish book publishing in various Jewish languages. In fact Ashkenazi Jews have lived in Venice since the establishment of the Venetian Ghetto in 1516. The Scuola Grande Tedesca, completed in 1528 is a testament to that, and Yiddish was part of everyday Jewish life here for centuries.

 

It is hard to engage with Yiddishland without addressing the fact that the word “Jew” has once again become politically charged as has any project that is visibly Jewish. Openly Jewish projects are finding difficulties both in finding a space to exist and to come into existence. This has also been the case for Yiddishland but to the curators and artists in the project that has made its existence more rather than less relevant. As Fiks puts it poignantly “when is a good time for Yiddish art? Has there ever been such a time? …But again, the sense of continuity of Yiddish culture depends on its continuing. We are doing this Yiddish Pavilion project, so it must be a good time to do Jewish projects.”

 

According to Veits, what makes these projects doable (and has always has is) “a wide and supportive network — artists, contributors, and audiences who have engaged deeply and

[1] Maria Veits interview

[2] Gordon A. (1991) in Jewish Quarterly Review, 82(1-2)

[3] https://yiddishlandpavilion.art/thewanderingpavilion

[4] Ibid Maria Veits interview

[5] https://boingboing.net/2014/01/13/holding-mirrors-up-to-police-l.html

[6] https://yiddishlandpavilion.art/theyiddishlandsukkahpavilion