It began with five broken plates.
They had belonged to the grandmother of Argentine writer and traveler Dan Lande. After accidentally breaking them, he decided to take the pieces back to the Eastern European towns his grandparents had left behind.
That first trip developed into “La Ruta de las Bobes,” an ongoing project in which Lande visits the birthplaces of other people’s grandparents, documents what he finds and leaves a fragment of an inherited plate behind.
A selection of those journeys will be shown at the Jerusalem Biennale, opening on Sept. 24, alongside another Latin American exhibition that approaches Jewish continuity from a very different direction.
While Lande returns to the places from which earlier generations departed, Mexican artist Alejandro Glatt is preparing to send a mezuzah to the moon.
The two exhibitions form part of the Biennale’s seventh edition, which will present works by more than 250 Israeli and international artists in 42 exhibitions at 21 venues across Jerusalem. This year’s theme, “De Profundis,” or “From the Depths,” draws on Psalm 130 and its opening words: “Out of the depths I call You.”
A different sense of time
Tammy Kohn, the Buenos Aires-based curator of “La Ruta de las Bobes,” first came across Lande’s work on his Instagram account, @rulodeviaje.
Kohn began studying Jewish art at university in Jerusalem and later pursued an academic career in Israel and New York. After returning to Buenos Aires, she increasingly focused her research and curatorial work on Latin American Jewish art.
Kohn was drawn to the way Lande combined photographs with written accounts of the families and places he encountered.
“From the moment I saw it, I was certain that it had to materialize into an exhibition, even if it was a small one with a little selection of the stories,” she told JNS.
Lande is both a writer and an experienced traveler, and he had already been sharing accounts of his journeys online. Breaking his grandmother’s plates pushed him to investigate his own family history. Then other people began approaching him.
They asked him to look for a particular village or find some trace of the place their grandmother or grandfather had once known. From South America, Eastern Europe could seem deceptively small. Reaching isolated villages and finding the right people proved much more difficult.
Lande would stay for several days, sometimes as long as a week, getting to know the people living there and trying to understand the place as it is today. At the same time, he remained in contact with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren whose family stories had sent him there.
“He connected with the grandchild in South America and the people living today in such remote towns for us,” Kohn said. “He is really immersed in that reality with a different sense of time.”
An online Bobes [grandmothers] Club grew around the travels, providing support and company while Lande was on the road alone. He shared his discoveries with its members as he went.
The journeys have now produced more than 50 stories. Some are Jewish, while others concern non-Jewish families whose grandparents emigrated to Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America.
One of Kohn’s favorites is the story of Paulina from Strečno, a town in present-day Slovakia. It ends with a piece of a plate being placed in the wall of a medieval castle.
“The personal story turned into part of a town, the same way the town is part of Paulina and her descendants’ identity,” Kohn said.
The fact that Paulina’s was not a Jewish story mattered to her. Although the project grew out of Lande’s Jewish family history, she said, it soon became recognizably Latin American.
“Dan’s story is a little bit everyone’s story in Argentina, a country of immigrants,” she said. “There is something that is passed down from one generation to the next: the food, the inherited traditions, the plates.”
QR links and AI recordings
The Biennale exhibition includes five photographic stories and a sixth presented on video, a small selection from the full project. QR codes link visitors to audio accounts in Spanish, English transcriptions and shorter English recordings.
Lande was traveling while the exhibition was being prepared, so the shortened English recordings use an artificial-intelligence version of his voice. The English texts themselves were written by a person, Kohn stressed.
The original Spanish recordings are longer and have the feel of podcast episodes. Kohn hopes visitors will save the links and listen to them later, even if they do not have time to hear the complete stories in the gallery.
The plates in the photographs have not been repaired. Lande carries and leaves behind their broken pieces.
Kohn interprets the fragments as belonging in two places at once. The people who emigrated remain part of their former towns, while those towns continue to shape descendants raised far away.
“The plates that broke were not ‘just’ plates,” she said. “They were the last material memory that was left of the bobe.”
Showing the project in Jerusalem may also change the way some visitors encounter it. Israelis whose families came from Argentina or Uruguay may recognize Lande’s world, but the work has wider relevance in a country built largely by immigrants and refugees.
Bringing the mezuzah to outer space
Alejandro Glatt’s contribution to the Biennale also began with a journey, although his work traveled much farther.
Glatt is a third-generation Ashkenazi Jewish Mexican and describes himself as a multidisciplinary artist, Jewish cultural leader and proud Zionist. His work brings his Jewish and Mexican backgrounds together rather than treating them as separate identities.
“Mexico gave me color, humor, sensuality, fruit and a certain creative chutzpah,” he told JNS. “Judaism gave me memory, ritual, resilience, community and the responsibility to think about what we leave for the next generation.”
Even his surname became material. After years of being asked whether he was “glatt kosher,” he began making what he calls Glatt Kosher Pop Art.
“Instead of opening a kosher restaurant, I created kosher art,” he said.
The papaya has appeared throughout his work as a symbol of Mexico, fertility, abundance and change. When cut open, Glatt said, the fruit resembles a small universe filled with seeds.
In February 2024, an archival representation of one of his papaya works landed on the moon as part of Lunaprise, a cultural archive carried aboard the Odysseus spacecraft. The archive contained 222 art projects.
“Tachlis, the practical truth, is that there isn’t a fresh papaya rolling around on the moon,” Glatt said. “But the papaya artwork, its image and everything it represents physically traveled there as part of the archive.”
Afterward, he began thinking about what he could send to represent his Jewish identity.
He chose a mezuzah.
“If the papaya represents my Mexican identity, what object could represent my Jewish identity and its legacy?” he said. “The answer came very naturally.”
His “Mezuzah to the Moon” project has been accepted for inclusion in a future lunar payload overseen by SpaceBlue, which also curated his participation in Lunaprise. The spacecraft, launch date and final physical form of the work have yet to be announced. The mission is expected to form part of a series of art, music and film projects in space planned between 2027 and 2030.
At the Biennale, Glatt’s installation will feature five large mezuzah sculptures surrounded by 25 smaller ones. A video will explain the project and its proposed journey.
Visitors will recognize the outline of the mezuzah and the Hebrew letter shin from a distance. Closer inspection reveals faces, organizations, family stories, historical material and references to contemporary Jewish culture.
Glatt said the wall will become “a doorway without an actual door.”
A mezuzah usually marks the entrance to a Jewish home. On the moon, at least for now, there is no home and no doorway. That absence is part of Glatt’s work.
“If one day people live on the moon or somewhere even farther away, what will they place at the entrance to their homes?” he asked. “What will remind them of their ancestors?”
He does not claim to be addressing the halachic questions raised by placing a mezuzah in space. He is using it as an artistic and cultural object, and as a prompt.
“Can we build a new home without forgetting the first one?” he asked. “Can technological progress also carry spiritual memory?”
For Glatt, Jerusalem is the right place to raise those questions. Its history is present in everyday life, he said, but that does not mean Jewish creativity must remain fixed in the past.
“Jerusalem is not only a place to look backward,” he said. “It can also be a launch point for imagining the next thousand years of Jewish life.”
Kohn put the relationship between past and future more simply.
“Learning about our past to shape the future in the present is exactly what kept us alive for so many centuries,” she said. “It is having roots connected to the earth and the desire to grow beautiful green leaves.”
