Sala-Manca

On Paradise Inn Hotel (model)

curated by Yaakov Israel, in the frame of “Autarkic Economy”, Hansen House, September-October 2017

Since its founding, Sala-Manca has wandered between places, stemming from the perception that the “center”, as the compasses manufacturer Arturo Maura said, “is everywhere and the circle nowhere”. At their debut, the Argentina House served as their base and in 2009 they have established Mamuta at the Daniela Pasal center for Media Arts in Ein Karem, where they have started The Museum of the Contemporary project. At the end of 2013 they relocated to Hansen’s House and continued Mamuta’s activity as a center for arts and research. The Maquette for Paradise Inn – a one person hotel deals with the history of Hansen House. Building the model is another artistic step in a series of research-based projects that creates a contemporary context to local history, characterizing many of the art works being done in the frame of Mamuta. The model is the next phase to the building of a hotel on a large area of the Hansen House garden called Paradise Inn – a one person hotel – a project presented to the public during the summer of 2015. The hotel was an artistic venture designed by Nir Yahalom and Sala-Manca as part of the activities of The Ethnographic Department (another on-going project they initiated), which deals with historical aspects of Hansen House and its past as a lepers hospital. In the past, the garden that surrounded Hansen house and the wall became an enclave in the Jerusalem reality, and contributed much to its image as a phantasmagorical space, where many myths and urban legends evolved. The basic urge of human curiosity has been embedded in the planning of the hotel, so one wall was built from blinds that open for only eight seconds in return for a payment of three Shekels, enabling a glimpse inside where the viewers were exposed to the natural vegetation that shielded the inside of the hotel. This aroused the voyeuristic passion of the visitors and strengthened the narrative of the garden as a magical space. Hansen House’s main porch was another viewpoint inside the hotel’s domain, but also very partial, so the viewer was left unfulfilled, looking inside the forbidden space yet seeing nothing. Sala-Manca Group, through a curatorial approach, chose to reflect on their previous project Paradise Inn. They invited the artist Itamar Mendes-Flohr to reproduce a model of Paradise Inn and to translate his experience in the Garden of Eden into a 3D object. Paradise Inn’s maquette represents a double mention to Hansen House’s past. The first is direct, looking at the way the garden and the wall were used to strengthen the many narratives on Hansen House and its area. The second one creates a continuation to the project Paradise Inn – A One Person Hotel, whose building and presentation were a reference to these historical elements. The act of gazing inside encourages the viewer to develop imaginary narratives about the different scenarios inside the enclosed garden. Conceiving the model and the use of it to look at the history of the place turns to a performative act done especially for this exhibition, where Sala-Manca members take the role of historiographs. Thus, metaphorically, they examine the way the historical story is told, through the way they choose to tell and interpret the well-known narratives. This format offers a new way to rewrite history: their artistic action diverts historiography from the written word and places the narrative in the object. The act of looking at the model, confronts the viewer with the historical layer of Hansen House and an array of possibilities to interpretate these overlaping layers.

Yaakov Israel

Link to the Paradise-Inn project: http://old.sala-manca.net/?p=973 and review: http://old.sala-manca.net/?p=995

Pics by Yaakov Israel

Pics by Sala-manca:

In the winter of 2017, a group of artists (the SalaManca Group, Nir Yahalom, Ktura Manor and Max Epstein) began building an unauthorized but accurate replica of a painted wooden sukkah from Germany (dating to 1850), which is on display in the permanent collection of the Israel Museum and is known as The Deller Sukkah.
The artists photographed the original sukkah at the museum, read articles about it, and even traveled to Fischach—a small town in Bavaria—where the original sukkah had been built and subsequently, with the outbreak of World War II, smuggled to Palestine to save it from the Nazis. At Fischach, some of the artists met with the local mayor, visited the graves of the Deller family members (owners of the original sukkah), toured the local synagogue (which now serves as a dental clinic), and documented at all on video.
At the same time, back in Jerusalem, the artists Adi Kaplan and Shahar Carmel created replicas of postcards from the town from 1920 (circa), and, in the bowels of the basement of the old leper colony building in Jerusalem, reconstructed one of the most beautiful sukkot in the world. The replica is a perfect copy of the original, but for a few deliberate differences between it and the original—some substantive and some symbolic.
As a consequence of the replication process, the paintings on the walls of the sukkah subtly transformed: the image of Jerusalem on one of the walls, which in the original was an object of yearning, became a kind of proprietary statement; the scenes of the pastoral German village on the three other walls, which used to provided a kind of visual record of the original landscape, became a wistful memorial of a community and a time that no longer exist. Other changes that were made to the replica effectively rendered it a new original: while the sukkah at the Museum is an ethnographic object that can be viewed but not entered, its replica, as created by contemporary artists, is an artwork into which entry is not only allowed, but encouraged, and can even serve as a bona fide sukkah.
The paintings themselves have also undergone small but significant changes: in them, the walls of the synagogue feature graffiti inscriptions that attest to its transformation into a clinic, and the house of the Deller family (the former owners of the sukkah) now bears the names of the two families who live in it today—one German, the other Turkish.
The replica sukkah is on display at the Absent Landscapes exhibition at Hansen House in Jerusalem (the former leper colony/hospital). The exhibition also features a film titled Eternal Sukkah—a past project by the group—which tells the story of how a hybrid Bedouin/Jewish sukkah became an exhibit at the Israel Museum in 2015, heralding the idea of transporting a sukkah from the museum into real life. A complex dialogue takes place between the Bedouin/Jewish “Eternal Sukkah” and the physical, metaphorical, and historical composite that is the “Deller Sukkah” at the Absent Landscapes exhibition. It is a dialogue between a nomadism and ownership; between enforced transience and transience as a religious value; between absentee landscapes and present ones; and between individual artistic endeavors of different historical periods, each of which, in its own way, exemplifies the drama of its time