Yiddishland Pavilion Residencies 2024-2025
Yiddishland Pavilion, in collaboration with Venezia Contemporanea and La Storta Residency Space, announces an open call for a short-term residency in Venice, taking place October 13–23, 2025 in Venice.
The residency grows out of Yiddishland Pavilion’s ongoing work at and beyond the Venice Biennale. Yiddishland Pavilion creates a non-national and polyphonic space for artistic research, dialogue, and experimentation. The residency continues that trajectory, offering artists to begin a new or to further develop an existing project with the focus on questioning borders, dismantling exclusions, and imagining new forms of belonging.
We are inviting artists to engage with Yiddishland Pavilion’s principles: diaspora as a cultural and political space; doykeit (“hereness”) as a way of grounding art in the here and now; and polyphony and multiplicity as artistic strategies. We are particularly interested in projects that engage with Yiddish as a living language and cultural resource, as a space of translation, hybridity, and memory that persists across borders and historical erasure. We welcome works that questions exclusion, resists rising nationalism, and navigates the urgent currents of displacement, while imagining radical solidarities and unexpected forms of belonging.
Projects developed during the residency may also be considered for presentation in a future edition of Yiddishland Pavilion.
The residency provides accommodation/workspace at La Storta Residency Space in Venice, along with curatorial support from Yiddishland Pavilion. Travel and per diem costs are not covered.
La Storta Residency is located in the historic Jewish Ghetto of Venice — the first in Europe, established in 1516 — long a center of Jewish life in the city, shaped by both Yiddish and Ladino traditions.
The residency is open to contemporary artists working in any medium. Applicants at all career stages are welcome.
Deadline for applications is September 12, 2025.
To apply, please send a short bio, a portfolio (PDF or link), and a description of your project or research focus to yiddishlandpavilion@gmail.com.
Participants will be selected by Yiddishland Pavilion and Venezia Contemporanea and notified by September 19, 2025.
The residency grows out of Yiddishland Pavilion’s ongoing work at and beyond the Venice Biennale. Yiddishland Pavilion creates a non-national and polyphonic space for artistic research, dialogue, and experimentation. The residency continues that trajectory, offering artists to begin a new or to further develop an existing project with the focus on questioning borders, dismantling exclusions, and imagining new forms of belonging.
We are inviting artists to engage with Yiddishland Pavilion’s principles: diaspora as a cultural and political space; doykeit (“hereness”) as a way of grounding art in the here and now; and polyphony and multiplicity as artistic strategies. We are particularly interested in projects that engage with Yiddish as a living language and cultural resource, as a space of translation, hybridity, and memory that persists across borders and historical erasure. We welcome works that questions exclusion, resists rising nationalism, and navigates the urgent currents of displacement, while imagining radical solidarities and unexpected forms of belonging.
Projects developed during the residency may also be considered for presentation in a future edition of Yiddishland Pavilion.
The residency provides accommodation/workspace at La Storta Residency Space in Venice, along with curatorial support from Yiddishland Pavilion. Travel and per diem costs are not covered.
La Storta Residency is located in the historic Jewish Ghetto of Venice — the first in Europe, established in 1516 — long a center of Jewish life in the city, shaped by both Yiddish and Ladino traditions.
The residency is open to contemporary artists working in any medium. Applicants at all career stages are welcome.
Deadline for applications is September 12, 2025.
To apply, please send a short bio, a portfolio (PDF or link), and a description of your project or research focus to yiddishlandpavilion@gmail.com.
Participants will be selected by Yiddishland Pavilion and Venezia Contemporanea and notified by September 19, 2025.
October 13 - October 23, 2025 Jewish Ghetto, Venice
Deadline: September 12, 2025
Deadline: September 12, 2025
Open Call for a short-term residency
In the first part of October 2025, the Sala-Manca group (Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman), a duo of artists and performers, will spend a few days at the Yiddishland Pavilion Residency, co-organized with La Storta exhibition and residency space.
During their residency, they will develop a new edition of their continouos Sukkah project, adapting it to the local context of Venice. The project, an ongoing exploration spanning over a decade, builds on their long-standing work with the sukkah as a structure of radical imagination and cultural critique, transforming fragile architecture into a vessel for mobility, hospitality, and diasporic poetics.
Sala-Manca (Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman) is a group of Argentinian born and independent artists that have worked mainly in Jerusalem since 2000 and in Toronto. The group creates in different fields: performance, video, installation, curatorial and publishing. Sala-manca’s works deal with poetics of translation (cultural, mediatic and social), with textual, urban and net contexts as well as social and political issues.
During their residency, they will develop a new edition of their continouos Sukkah project, adapting it to the local context of Venice. The project, an ongoing exploration spanning over a decade, builds on their long-standing work with the sukkah as a structure of radical imagination and cultural critique, transforming fragile architecture into a vessel for mobility, hospitality, and diasporic poetics.
Sala-Manca (Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman) is a group of Argentinian born and independent artists that have worked mainly in Jerusalem since 2000 and in Toronto. The group creates in different fields: performance, video, installation, curatorial and publishing. Sala-manca’s works deal with poetics of translation (cultural, mediatic and social), with textual, urban and net contexts as well as social and political issues.
in residency at La Storta Space, Venice
October 2025
Sala-Manca
(Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman)
Sala-Manca
(Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman)
In his residency in Venice that took place during the 60th Venice biennale of Art artist and architect Daniel Toretsky focused on scanning and mapping the Giardini and other Biennale sites, exploring how their unique architecture, waterways, and landscapes could shape his future project for the Yiddishland Pavilion. The residency allowed Toretsky to engage with the layered history, cultural density, and ephemeral qualities of Venice, considering how a temporary structure could resonate within this singular urban and artistic context.
Out of this process emerged The Hereness Wagon, a project exploring the tensions between transience and permanence, ephemerality and eternity, the sacred and the profane. Guided by the principles of Yiddishland vernacular architecture, the work demonstrated how minimal materials could transform an existing space, imbuing it with layered meaning and resonances that unfolded across time and perception.
Hereness Wagon premiered a year later from the residency, on May 8-11, 2025 during the professioal preview and the pening weekend of the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Daniel Toretsky, a Cornell-trained architect based in Brooklyn, works as an educator, exhibit designer, and MFA candidate at The New School. His practice explores Jewish spatial rituals to create gathering spaces rooted in community, heritage, and futurism.
Out of this process emerged The Hereness Wagon, a project exploring the tensions between transience and permanence, ephemerality and eternity, the sacred and the profane. Guided by the principles of Yiddishland vernacular architecture, the work demonstrated how minimal materials could transform an existing space, imbuing it with layered meaning and resonances that unfolded across time and perception.
Hereness Wagon premiered a year later from the residency, on May 8-11, 2025 during the professioal preview and the pening weekend of the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Daniel Toretsky, a Cornell-trained architect based in Brooklyn, works as an educator, exhibit designer, and MFA candidate at The New School. His practice explores Jewish spatial rituals to create gathering spaces rooted in community, heritage, and futurism.
in residency in Venice
May 2024
Daniel Toretsky
Daniel Toretsky
