Encore

Design: Shanit Adam
Story: Demeke mtiku
Building: The Gojo in Kiryat Menachem. Dominican Republic Street 3

In the courtyard of Kiryat Yovel Community Center, the Ethiopian community has built a Gojo: a traditional round hut supported by a Wegagra, a tree trunk at its center. Inside, there is a bench and the pleasant scent of straw and nature.
Demekeh Metiku, a member of the community, recounts that many contributed to the construction effort: the young and the elderly, the passionate and the skeptical. The building materials—straw and mud—originate here, in the Promised Land, but the story they tell—a story about the wisdom of manual labor—originates elsewhere, in another homeland. Thus, the structure commemorates the voices of past generations and the spirit that came to Israel with the immigrants from Ethiopia.
The Gojo was a gift from the community's elders to the young: a meeting place, a place where time slows down, a place of respite and acceptance of change and differences.
Shanit Adam sees the Gojo as a gift from the community to Jerusalem—an eternal city where daily life is often overwhelming. It served Adam as a starting point for designing objects that remind us to stop, listen, contemplate, look near and far, and see the simple beauty of what is.
As a daughter of immigrants and a returnee herself, Demeka contemplates the processes of personal and communal identity construction, wondering about integration into Israeli society and the sense of belonging to it. In seeking to examine the desire to learn and discover something new, her work engages with the acts of preservation and cultural erasure—whether voluntary or enforced by societal norms and the establishment. The use of material and form to create souvenirs that hold information, memories, and emotions allows Adam to evoke thoughts about the values that immigrants bring with them—values that our society has not always had the wisdom to embrace.