Three days of site-specific artworks in Schneller historical compound, Jerusalem | as part of Open House Jerusalem Festival 2019
The Schneller compound has inspired residents and guests for over 150 years, since its founding as the Syrian Orphanage, through a period as a military base, to the current site.
For many, the word “Schneller” names a layered memory: a modern ruin of a world full of ideas and dreams, a symbol of striving to create a different kind of reality in the local space.
During few months, at the same time that the conservation works were taking place on the site, prior to the establishment of a museum by the Kehilot Israel institute, a group of Jerusalem artists has been working in the space.
The artists who came together for The Schneller Order documented, researched, and finally bring the viewer face to face with layers that were repressed from memory. They re-created the compound’s spaces while conducting a joint search for familiar and concealed strata, repressed narratives, and new contexts.
For only 3 days the artists will be creating works especially for the spaces alongside an exhibition of the site's history and future plans.
Visitors are invited to participate in the cycle of revealing and concealing of memory of the place.
Art director | Meydad Eliyahu Producer | Idan Avidani
The artists’ group: Itai Ron Gilboa | Michal Harada | Meydad Eliyahu | Noa Arad Yairi |Nomi Bruckmann | Kobi Vogman
Guest artists: Aviv Itzhaky | Ktura Manor and Rotem Manor | Shlomo Serry | Markey Funk
Sambation is a name for a mythical river. On the land across this river, Ten Lost Tribes of Israel found their shelter. Kazimierz – Jewish quarter of Krakow – for many centuries was surrounded by the river. The building at 32 Sebastiana Street stood right next to the river. Now it becomes a space of artistic activities of the Israeli collective Hamiffal. Especially for our festival.
It has an astonishing peculiarity. For, when it flows, it is a copious stream with a current far from sluggish; then all at once its sources fail, and for the space of six days it presents the spectacle of a dry bed; again, as though no change had occurred, it pours forth on the seventh day just as before. And it has always been observed to keep strictly to this order; whence they have called it the Sabbatical river, so naming it after the sacred seventh day of the Jews.
Josephus, Wars
The Jewish Culture Festival has invited a collective of artists from Jerusalem called HaMiffal to do the project inspired by Kazimierz – its history, cultural heritage and contemporary reality. On the border between the Jewish quarter and the old town, the Israeli artists will transform a flat in a historic town house at Św. Sebastiana 32, belonging to the Bosak family, into a huge installation, forming a temporary cultural centre.
The apartment evokes a different reality, arousing memories and flooding the space with many layers of local history. The scheme will include artistic interventions with the use of sculpture, paintings and video art as well as a diverse program of workshops, performances and artistic events with the participation of the audience.
Just like the legendary Sambation River, which was calm for 6 days and turned over boulders only on the Shabbat, providing a refuge for the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the collective’s total actions talk of the experience of dealing with absence, silenced myths, leading to the outburst of exposed art-making, stemming from suppressed subconsciousness.
6 months ago or so I was invited to create a new work with Anat Bosak to this year edition of the Jewish Culture Festival, Krakow.
This is a continuation for Hamiffal last year collaboration-Sambation art project
Happy to share some photos from the project which is taking a part every day until 30/6
LOST AND FOUND | Artefact production line will be activated as an archaeological experiment including documentation of material and community data of Festival visitors. The public is invited to participate in a workshop and in a “cast factory” for new human imprints and to discover finds in a fabricated Tel – our mound of contemporary archaeology.
The Project examines the capacity of the earth to hide and preserve the secrets of time and culture, posing questions about processes of discovery, documentation, and historical commemoration as well as about transformation processes of material into evidence of memory.
In the contemporary reality in which newly discovered archaeological finds frequently challenge history in general and Jewish history in particular, the current project is an attempt to concretize this change and express the power of the human search for what lies beneath the surface.
photos by:Szymon makuch, Edytya Dufaj
The Good Guys
Silkscreen print | 76/56 cm |2012