Being a non-national, a “pseudo-territorial” pavilion, in its second iteration the Yiddishland Pavilion offers a set of architectural and artistic proposals exploring what architecture becomes when detached from territory, and how it reflects the politics of diaspora—not as loss, but as presence and resilience. In place of statehood, it invokes Yiddishland: a stateless, transnational, and culturally resistant space shaped by migration, multilingualism, and shared memory. The Pavilion embraces a form of architectural thinking that is fluid, adaptable, and decentralized, where space is not tied to borders but is defined by solidarity, political imagination and vernacular approach.

At the core of this year’s Yiddishland Pavilion is the Bundist principle of doikeyt—a Yiddish word meaning “hereness.” Rooted in the political legacy of the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular socialist movement founded in the Russian Empire in 1897, doikeyt rejected both nationalism and assimilationist liberalism. Instead, the Bund advocated for Jewish cultural autonomy and solidarity with other oppressed groups, insisting that Jews build emancipatory futures not in distant promised lands, but right where they were—with others, not apart from them. It is a philosophy of presence, solidarity, and struggle. Through this lens, architecture becomes a means of world-making that values reuse over development, process over product, collectivity over monumentality.

Five artists, architects, and collectives were invited to imagine how a Yiddishland Pavilion could manifest architecturally within the context of the Biennale—as a gesture of cultural dissent, improvisation, creative speculation, and shared memory. Their proposals engage themes of statelessness, mobility, vernacular resistance, and diasporic futurity, and will be dispersed across the Biennale grounds, the Jewish Ghetto, and beyond.  This dispersion reflects the idea of architecture as something fluid and adaptable—resisting the permanence often associated with built environments.

Daniel Toretsky’s Der Vegele Fun Doikeyt  (Hereness Wagon)  emobodies the politics of portability. Contained in a suitcase and unfolded anew each time, the project fuses protest architecture, street performance, contemporary Klezmer, and Bundist aesthetics—creating temporary spaces for dance, noise, and joy as acts of defiance and presence.​​

This ethos of improvisation and solidarity resonates across the lagoon in Camp Doikeyt  by Julia Hedges and G Laster, which draws on the radical American legacy of Jewish summer camps—not as nostalgic retreats but as laboratories of collective formation and grassroots pedagogy. Mapping an imagined camp across Venice’s fragmented geography, their project practices co-resistance and ritual, proposing the camp as a roving, diasporic institution.

Echoing this theme of mobility, Constantin Boym’s Wandering Pavilion reclaims the figure of the Wandering Jew—not as a symbol of exile, but as a mobile cultural agent. This reflective, performative structure roves the Biennale grounds, sparking intimate exchanges while resisting fixity—a walking reminder that Jewishness, like space, is not confined by borders but shaped by movement, relation, and continual reinvention.That same refusal of permanence informs The Yiddishland Sukkah Pavilion proposal by Sala-Manca, constructed from salvaged materials in the historic Venetian Ghetto. Both shelter and a forum, it hosts the first-ever Yiddish-language symposium on transnational architecture, becoming a fragile yet intentional space where vernacular practice and diasporist imagination intersect.

Finally, Anna Kamyshan’s The Castle of Yiddishland, inspired by the architecture of wooden shtetl synagogues, “borrows” airspace—recalling how Jewish communities in Venice built synagogues on upper floors by acquiring air rights. The project speaks to the scarcity of physical space and meditates on displacement, resilience, and the quiet ingenuity of adaptation.

The Yiddishland Pavilion opens with performances during the Biennale preview and opening week in May 2025, intervening in Venice’s public and institutional spaces—from the Jewish Ghetto to the Arsenale—with acts of architectural disruption and collective assembly. In October 2025, the five proposals will converge in an exhibition at La Storta Gallery in the Venetian Ghetto, presented in partnership with Venezia Contemporanea, alongside a robust public program.

Refusing the logic of nation-states, Yiddishland Pavilion 2025 insists that architecture can be diasporic, anti-imperial, liberatory, and stemming from a minority language and culture that is permanently in a state of transition. Against permanence, it proposes adaptability. Against nationalism, solidarity. Against silence, noise. This is doikeyt —not just being here, but building here, together.


Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks
Curators of Yiddishland Pavilion

Yiddishland Pavilion 2025:

Architectures of Doikeyt

What does architecture become when it isn’t bound to land, borders, or a nation-state? Can a space exist without claiming territory—without demanding sovereignty or enclosure? What if architecture served not as a monument to power, but as a tool of diaspora, and solidarity?​​