Originally developed to counter the effects of urban life on Jewish bodies, American Jewish summer camps emerged in the mid-twentieth century as spaces of retreat—intended to preserve communal coherence in the face of modernity and assimilation. Over time, however, these camps have come to serve a range of ideological agendas, from Zionist nation-building to narratives of settler belonging.

Camp Doikeyt reclaims the form of the summer camp as a speculative, diasporist practice—one that resists territorial claims and nurtures new relationships to land, history, and community. First imagined in the Catskills, Camp Doikeyt retools the structures and rituals of the American Jewish summer camp to explore liberatory and non-national modes of Jewish belonging.

For the Yiddishland Pavilion, Camp Doikeyt: Venice Session brings this vision to the Venetian Lagoon. The project centers around a large double-sided tapestry, presented as an architectural cross-section through Venice. One side features the camp’s logo and zines about the camp session in Venice, including a wide view of the lagoon—a fragile system of marshland, stilted islands, and dredged channels—where the camp floats on boats and canoes, drifting between sites of historical and ecological importance. The other side reveals a series of vignettes depicting imagined camp activities throughout the city: a base camp established on Giudecca, the site of Venice’s earliest Jewish inhabitation; a critical reenactment of negotiations between Venetian Jews and Napoleon’s forces in the Jewish Ghetto; excavations at the Giardini, where campers expose the Istrian stone, larch pilings, and sedimentary layers beneath the Biennale pavilions; and canoe expeditions into the lagoon’s undeveloped marshes, where campers propagate reeds and grasses, participating in acts of territorial unmaking and ecological care. Binding these scenes together is the arc—a central figure in the tapestry—carrying tents, tools, food, and people, connecting distant locations and temporalities.

In May, the project will be activated through a public procession, in which the tapestry will be carried from through Venice, including the biennale grounds and the Jewish ghetto.  Along the route, performers will embody the spirit of the camp, and upon arrival, will deliver closing reflections from Camp Doikeyt’s imagined season—offering a moment of collective pause, play, and possibility within the diasporic imagination.
In October, the tapestry will be displayed free-standing at La Storta gallery, suspended between two wooden uprights rooted in Venetian mud, evoking the physical and social foundations Camp Doikeyt aims to reconfigure. It will also be adapted for virtual interaction, allowing viewers to explore the details of Camp Doikeyt’s summer in Venice online.

Julia Hedges (she/her) is a designer from Chicago whose work reimagines the organization and management of collective landscape by their inhabitants. With a Master’s of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard GSD and a bachelor degree in architecture from Yale University, she researches adaptive ecological infrastructure and cultural landscapes. Her design for a truck stop collective has been selected to be shown in The Space for Ideas at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Julia is currently a studio critic at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.

G Laster is a researcher and designer whose work seeks to reconfigure material conditions and to fabulate tools toward anti-hegemonic ends. They currently serve as a lecturer in urban design at the University of Washington Tacoma. They hold a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. They also hold dual bachelor’s degrees in architectural design and ethnic studies from Yale University.