HOIZ | 26.06.-5.07.2026

Ten years ago, FestivALT began in a private apartment. Before there was a festival, there was a home: a place where artists and thinkers gathered, ideas were tested, and contemporary Jewish culture could exist on its own terms—critical, experimental, intimate, and alive.  
Ten years later, we return.  
The celebration of ten years of FestivALT inaugurates HOIZ—the Yiddish word for house—transforming the apartment where FestivALT began into a permanent space for art, performance, conversation, and community. Returning to this house is both a celebration of our first decade and a reflection on what it means to call a place home.  
For centuries, Poland was home to one of the world’s largest and most vibrant Jewish communities. Jewish life shaped this country through language, politics, scholarship, music, theatre, and everyday existence. Home was never singular; it was built through encounter, contradiction, and coexistence.  
Today, Jewishness is too often understood through binaries—past or present, victim or perpetrator, religion or politics, Israel or diaspora. At a moment when public discourse increasingly reduces Jewish experience to geopolitical conflict, complexity risks giving way to simplification.  
HOIZ is our response.  
By opening a Jewish home to the public, we invite audiences into a space where Jewish culture can be encountered as lived experience rather than abstraction. HOIZ is unapologetically Jewish in its foundations, but expansive in its vision: a place where artists, thinkers, neighbours, and audiences of all backgrounds are invited into conversation.  
We imagine HOIZ as a home for independent and minority voices, offering space to artistic practices that often exist between disciplines, identities, and institutions. Through art, conversation, and hospitality, we seek to move beyond inherited binaries and create opportunities for genuine human connection.  
This has always been the ethos of FestivALT. Rather than treating Jewish culture as an object of memory, we understand it as a way of engaging with contemporary Poland—its histories, identities, tensions, and possibilities. Jewish perspectives are not external to Polish society; they are integral to its past and indispensable to imagining its future.  
It is fitting, then, that this anniversary programme is built on return. Many of the artists and works presented here have accompanied FestivALT over the last ten years. Their return is not retrospective but renewed. Looking back allows us to ask what still matters, what has changed, and what kind of future we want to build together.  

A house is never only a place. It is something we create together.
Welcome to HOIZ.