La Ruta de las Bobes ('The Bubbes' Route')

In February 2019, Argentine writer, travel storyteller, and content creator Dan Lande accidentally broke five plates that had belonged to his grandmother and which had been passed down the generations in his family for more than seventy years. This domestic and seemingly insignificant mishap triggered a profound sense of loss that quickly transformed into a travel plan: a journey to the towns his grandparents left behind in Eastern Europe, carrying fragments of those plates and creating ephemeral memorials "in situ". Thus began The Bubbes' (Grandmothers') Route, a project that turns intimate mourning into an active, shared practice of memory. What started as a personal act gradually evolved into a collective journey. Lande began receiving stories from other families – grandchildren who, like him, knew little about the places in which their grandparents had once lived before migration, exile, or destruction. Each homage unfolds through walking the streets, visiting schools, cemeteries, homes, and public spaces, and by placing a fragment of a broken plate there as a symbolic gesture. Presented at the Jerusalem Biennale, The Bubbes' Route resonates deeply with the theme De Profundis ('From the Depths'), understood here as delving into the depths of silence, a profound sense of absence, and a diasporic fragmentation. The broken plate functions as a fragile archive, bearing the marks of domestic life, loss, and transmission, while the act of returning to their origin becomes a form of listening to what remains unspoken in landscapes shaped by Jewish absence. The exhibition brings together photographs, video, audio testimonies, and archival materials documenting seven memorial journeys across Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Lithuania. The Bubbes' Route proposes memory not as restoration, but as a presence: a gesture that acknowledges fracture while opening a space for connection, storytelling, and shared responsibility.