Flying synagogue artwork destroyed by wind in Venice
A flying synagogue that briefly rose over the Venice lagoon has been destroyed by extreme winds. Nabatele, a balloon in the shape of a wooden shtetl synagogue, was torn apart on 17 September, The Art Newspaper reported.
The work was a helium-filled structure with a double membrane, or two-layer skin. It carried a replica prayer house from a shtetl, the name for a small historic Jewish town in eastern Europe, set upon a massive artificial rock. The image took its cue from The Castle in the Pyrenees, the 1959 painting by René Magritte that shows a rock floating in the sky topped by a castle.
It had taken flight in August as an official collateral event of the Venice Biennale in Venice, the major international art exhibition staged every two years. Collateral events are side projects admitted to the official programme but shown outside the main venues. Nabatele briefly floated 35 metres above the lagoon. It was listed as a large-scale open-air installation.
Its creator is London-based architect Anna Kamyshan. She was invited to develop the project by curators Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks on behalf of the Yiddishland pavilion, a platform focused on Yiddish language and culture. The Montreal Jewish Museum in Montreal was the sponsoring organisation, according to the Venice Biennale.
Kamyshan said the floating synagogue was intended to symbolise both uncertainty and hope. That idea was built for the open air, where weather cannot be kept out. Wind and light were part of the viewing conditions.
She said she had planned the balloon to withstand winds of 20 knots, the standard measure of speed at sea and in the air. It was destroyed at 50 knots. That is two and a half times the design limit.
In a post coinciding with the start of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, she wrote “to accept what I could not control, to forgive myself for what I could not prevent, and to begin again”. The message was brief. The loss was plain.
For visitors who saw it in August, the memory is simple. A small synagogue in the sky. It hung for a short time over the water before it was lost. No one had promised it would stay.
