Beside these heads, a sabil (سَبِيل)—a public drinking fountain—is installed. In Arabic, the word sabil means road. In Muslim culture, it was customary for a person who had experienced a miracle to give thanks by rigging up a water tap by the wayside, for public use, in arid places where drinking water was not readily available.

The human intimacy and sense of community of the cluster of heads becomes associated with the sabil, which serves as a meeting and gathering place, and engages with giving back to society and social connection. There is an intricate connection between the heads made of dried soil and the sabil water—one between two materials and two states of matter: the immense and invisible power stored in the earth in conditions of thirst, aridity, dryness, and wilting, versus running water that gives life and growth but can also mean destruction and annihilation if it engulfs and carries away the coterie of heads or dissolves the soil they are made of.

The heads—both individually, as discrete entities, and as an assembly or a community-in-waiting—appear to be resting in a state of slumber, still and withdrawn. They are like pre-germination seeds waiting for the moisture of water droplets, be it from the sabil or from the first rains and the intoxicating smell of the petrichor—the smell of the earth after the first rain; the very essence of life. Meanwhile, waiting for their hatching, the heads exist in a state of containment and potentiality, each drawing strength from its surrounding duplicates, from their silence and the magnetic induction between them. Contactless contact…

Image: Noa Tavori, Untitled, 2023, installation detail, clay, handmade, 20×25×25 (photo: Amit Domb)

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