Community Drift through the Archive of the Soul – Launch Event

The Archive of the Soul is a home for voices from the depths of the psyche – voices saturated with emotion, often shy, which, if not gathered, would disappear. It seeks to offer healing and nourishment to the soul through attentive listening to the voice and working with it, while simultaneously collecting its fragments as they emerge, in order to preserve time and place through their most intimate expressions. The archive was born as a response to, and a way of coping with, the events of October 7, and it will continue to gather voices from other times and places.

Between December 2023 and October 2025, artist Meital Kovo traveled across the country, inviting people from various circles of trauma and coping in relation to October 7 to encounter what lives within them through the voice, and to preserve this meaningful encounter through recording. The voices in the online archive were recorded as part of participatory art actions and were donated anonymously by the people who took part – women and men, girls and boys, from Shlomi to Ofakim, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

On February 6, 2026, the archive website will be launched at Mamuta Art and Research Center, located in Hansen House, Jerusalem. As part of the event, Kovo will guide a community drift through the archive. The audience will be invited to recline on low sofas and cushions in a dark, acoustically treated space, and to embark on a shared journey into the spaces behind the eyes and between the ears—to wander through the archive, listen to some of the voices preserved within it, and hear the stories behind the participatory art actions in which they were recorded. Following the guided drift through the website, those who wish will be able to take part in a new participatory art action: Journey Remnants.