Yiddishland Sukkah Pavilion – An Audio Tour
Sala-Manca
(Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman)
(Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman)
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.
Credits:
Text: Esther (Sala-manca) | Voice Yiddish version: Edit Kuper, English version: Lea Mauas | Recording: Joao Delgado. Post: Amir Bolzman. Thanks to Miriam Thrin and Sarmishta Subramanian. Short quotes from Haim Zhitlovsky from Adventures in Yiddishland by Jeffrey Shandler, and Reuven Abergel from "From ritual to protest: Sukkot in the garden of hope", by Gabriele Berlinger.
Since international pavilions are usually multilingual, the tour is available in both Yiddish and English.
Sala-Manca (Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman)
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.
Their work and performances has been shown in different shows and festivals in venues such us: The Israel Museum, The Israel Festival, Petach Tikva Art Museum, Haifa Museum of Art; Tate Modern; Eyebeam New York, BlackBox Belfast; Transmediale, Berlin; The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon; The Jerusalem Film Festival; NYU; IMPA, La Fabrica, Buenos Aires; Castle Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Kaunas Cultural Capital 2022, and the Hansen House.
Sala-Manca founded and edited Hearat Shulaym art journal (Note in the Margin): Independent Quarterly for Contemporary Art and Literature (2001-2007), curated and produced the Heara events – multidisciplinary events organized in an independent way with no commercial or official sponsors, between other projects. In 2009 they founded and directed the Mamuta Art and Research Center which ran at the Daniela Passal’s house between 2009-2012 and in Hansen House since November 2013. The group also edited the books The Ethnographic Department of the Museum of the Contemporary, 2017, Jerusalem: Mamuta Art and Research Center; Heara - Independent Jerusalem Art Scene at the beginning of the 21st Century (edited together with Ronen Eidelman), 2014, Jerusalem: Mamuta Art and Research Center.
Lea Mauas is the current director of Mamuta Art and Research Center and Phd candidate at Queen’s University, ON, Canada. Dr. Diego Rotman is, between July 2019 and August 2024, serves as the Head of the Department of Theater Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during 2024-2025 served as Visiting Professor at the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Their work and performances has been shown in different shows and festivals in venues such us: The Israel Museum, The Israel Festival, Petach Tikva Art Museum, Haifa Museum of Art; Tate Modern; Eyebeam New York, BlackBox Belfast; Transmediale, Berlin; The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon; The Jerusalem Film Festival; NYU; IMPA, La Fabrica, Buenos Aires; Castle Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Kaunas Cultural Capital 2022, and the Hansen House.
Sala-Manca founded and edited Hearat Shulaym art journal (Note in the Margin): Independent Quarterly for Contemporary Art and Literature (2001-2007), curated and produced the Heara events – multidisciplinary events organized in an independent way with no commercial or official sponsors, between other projects. In 2009 they founded and directed the Mamuta Art and Research Center which ran at the Daniela Passal’s house between 2009-2012 and in Hansen House since November 2013. The group also edited the books The Ethnographic Department of the Museum of the Contemporary, 2017, Jerusalem: Mamuta Art and Research Center; Heara - Independent Jerusalem Art Scene at the beginning of the 21st Century (edited together with Ronen Eidelman), 2014, Jerusalem: Mamuta Art and Research Center.
Lea Mauas is the current director of Mamuta Art and Research Center and Phd candidate at Queen’s University, ON, Canada. Dr. Diego Rotman is, between July 2019 and August 2024, serves as the Head of the Department of Theater Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during 2024-2025 served as Visiting Professor at the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.