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.

Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks
Curators of Yiddishland Pavilion

Yiddishland Pavilion 2026

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.

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.

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