Illustrator, artist and activist Ayala Meidan brings two years of living through ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine into a studio practice developed at Can Serrat residency in Catalonia, combining collected text and image to find language for experiences that resist it.
Some experiences do not resolve into words. Ayala Meidan arrived at the Can Serrat artist residency in Catalonia in May 2025 carrying two years of living in Israel-Palestine during a period of ongoing genocide, and years of active involvement in responding to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank. The project she developed there is, among other things, a search: for words where there is only silence, for images that might hold what language cannot quite reach.
The daily practice that underlies the work has been building for several years. Meidan collects fragments from everyday life: overheard conversations, personal experiences, images and phrases that accumulate into a personal archive of thoughts and visual impressions. In the studio, she moves between modes depending on what the material calls for: sometimes entirely intuitive, sometimes beginning from lists of words played with visually, sometimes analytical, examining the precise meaning of each image or sentence. This flexibility is not inconstancy. It is a practice calibrated to shifting mental and emotional states, one that allows the work to meet her wherever she is.
“This project explores my daily practice of collecting images and text, creating a personal archive, and examining how personal experience connects with the social and political reality,” she explains.
The connection between those two registers, the intimate and the collective, is where the work lives. Small narratives move between a personal interior and the wider world that has shaped it, neither fully public nor fully private, drawing a line between the two that is also a conversation. “As an activist who acts against the violence in Gaza and the West Bank,” she says, “this practice is my way of understanding, processing, and documenting the ways in which reality affects me and the community I work within.”
The residency allowed that language to expand and, crucially, to be received by others. Supported by the mentorship team and fellow residents, Meidan was able to see how the intimate world she constructs is perceived and reinterpreted by people outside it, a form of testing whether what feels irreducibly personal can still communicate across distance. The works on paper, made in black ink and oil pastel alongside digital prints, carry that quality: they feel individual in their reference points and legible in their emotional register, rooted in a specific political reality while reaching toward something more widely shared.
Ayala Meidan is an illustrator, multidisciplinary artist and activist based in Barcelona. She holds a BA in Social Work, a field in which she continues to work professionally alongside her illustration practice. Her work has appeared in Haaretz newspaper and Einayim children’s magazine. She is currently pursuing her MA in Illustration at ELISAVA, Barcelona.
Finding Words Where There Is Silence, 2025. Black ink and oil pastel on paper; digital print. Developed during artist residency at Can Serrat, Catalonia, Spain, May 2025.
