Archive

ARCHIVE

Jerusalem Design Week Installation
Curators: Tal Erez, Anat Zafran

In ARCHIVE, the ground becomes both subject and narrator — a living surface that holds within it fragments of time, layers of meaning, and the silent memory of material culture. This installation draws inspiration from archaeological processes, where digging is a ritual act of listening, and every shard retrieved is a whisper from the past.

Rooted in the soil of the Middle East, ARCHIVE reflects on the land not as a neutral backdrop but as an active body — marked, imprinted, and inscribed with the traces of human presence. The installation echoes ancient storage pits, unearthed vessels, and broken structures, reinterpreted through contemporary ceramic forms. These objects, shaped by hand and fire, become artifacts of an imagined excavation: part fiction, part truth.

This work considers what it means to collect, preserve, and display. It asks: what stories do we choose to keep, and which erode over time? By re-contextualizing materials and techniques, ARCHIVE offers a poetic reflection on materiality, heritage, and the aesthetics of absence.

The installation invites viewers to move through a tactile landscape — one that bridges ancient craft and present-day narrative, the intimate and the monumental, the seen and the buried.