Human Bricks (Livnei Adam) Roi Carmeli and Shmulik Twig, 2025 Earth and sand, rammed earth technique.

Earth is the first material of any place, and also what remains when everything has been ruined. Human Bricks is built from earth gathered by people for whom this landscape is home. Members of emergency response teams from communities along the northern border each went to a place in the landscape that holds personal meaning for them, and collected earth there with us.. From Menara, Yiftach, Mahanayim, Amir, Dafna, Yiron, Sasa and Gonen, a single building material was born.

The earth was compressed into bricks, and the bricks became a wall, a structure that hovers between a ruin and a home. It looks like something that has already collapsed, or something not yet completed, and the eye cannot decide which. A community living on a border is built in the same way. It is rebuilt every day from whatever material remains, knowing the wall may not hold.

The title rests on a single Hebrew root: adam (human) and adama (earth). The bricks are earth, and they are also people. Each brick holds a piece of landscape and the person who chose it, and together they form a space one can stand inside. The installation proposes that responsibility for the land is, first of all, people’s responsibility toward one another.

Created as part of a community-based art program by Zumu Upper Galilee.