Israel’s first mobile museum brings pop-up culture to forgotten town
ZUMU, a roving project of art installations and community outreach, will spend one month in the hard-knock Israeli town of Yeruham, where most children have never visited a museum.
Yeruham is a speck-sized town sitting amid the sand dunes and beige craters of Israel’s Negev Desert. There isn’t much there: The city has one shopping center, two fast-food restaurants and several thousand bored youths. It’s a windswept, desolate place, one of the dozens of similarly bereft and far-flung settlements that line Israel’s periphery, all existing in an orbit only a few hours drive from Tel Aviv but seemingly another universe away.
The closest museum or arts center to Yeruham is in the city of Beersheba, which is 45 minutes away, a length that is prohibitive both by distance (Israeli teens can’t drive until they turn 18) and also by cost. Which is why Milana Gitzin-Adiram, a curator with projects including the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale under her belt, decided that the solution was not bringing Yeruham’s youth to a museum. It was to bring the museum to Yeruham.
This month, Gitzin-Adiram launched ZUMU, Israel’s first-ever mobile museum. Or rather, to put it in her words, she helped Yeruham launch the museum.
The name ZUMU is a portmanteau of the Hebrew words for “movement” (zuz) and “museum” (muzeon). Gitzin-Adiram hopes that after spending one month among the dust-blown abandoned schoolhouse that serves as the grounds of the pop-up museum in Yeruham, the project will move to other similarly impoverished communities throughout Israel, like a cultural caravan on wheels.
