The House in Gades: Rebuilding a Physical Space from Memories

Gades is a village in southern Yemen where 80 Jewish families lived until 1950. After the Magic Carpet aliyah, most of the village’s inhabitants resettled in the moshav of Giv’at Ye’arim in the Jerusalem hills, where I grew up.

This final project attempts to recreate a typical Gades house. I gathered most of the research materials through conversations and rambles around Giv’at Ye’arim, listening to stories and memories which I used to construct a house. Tracing the material reality through the words allows me to enter the Gades house as a living space, which exists in the memory of a community that no longer calls this place home.