Yasmin Zehavi and the Conchylomania jewelry series for PREZIOSA YOUNG 2024

Currently residing in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 25-year-old Yasmin Zehavi graduated in 2023 from the Department of Jewelry and Fashion at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.
Alongside Korean YeJin Choi and American Margo Csipő, the Israeli jewelry artist was selected by the international jury of PREZIOSA YOUNG 2024 – the contemporary jewelry competition conceived and organized by Le Arti Orafe, curated by its founder Giò Carbone and art historian Alice Rendon.
The first stop of the traveling exhibition, showcasing the jewelry of these three winners and the six artists who received special mentions, will be MIDA 2025, the annual Florentine event celebrating international craftsmanship. Other venues of the full show will be the Galerie Door by Doreen Timmers in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, from 28th June to 20th July and the Milanese LibriBianchi Gallery by Lorenzo e Simona Perrone in October, in conjunction with Milan Jewelry Week 2025. Finally, a selection of pieces from the winners only will take part in Roma Jewelry Week 2025, from October 24th to 26th.

The following lines tell the story of Zehavi, her family and cultural roots, her personal vision of contemporary jewelry, the motivations that led her to pursue a career in this field, revealing the passion and poetry that permeate her work.

 

 

I am the descendant of a long lineage of goldsmiths whose craft was passed down through generations in Algeria, enduring until the country’s liberation from French colonial rule in 1962.

As a child, I was immersed in the stories my father told—tales of my grandfather’s delicate labor, of his voyages across the villages nestled in the Atlas Mountains, where he bartered for gold and silver and exchanged his handcrafted jewelry for the needs and dreams of local communities.

In my mind’s eye, Algeria emerged as a mythical realm—vivid and fragrant, like a canvas by Delacroix: wild, lyrical, and shimmering with mystery. Enchanted by this vision, I fantasized about continuing the path of my ancestors, to learn how to shape metal into memory.

While training in the technical intricacies of metalwork, I embarked on a parallel, inner journey—an archaeological pursuit of identity. I began researching traditional Algerian jewelry, and that path led me to collections of colonial postcards from the early 20th century. These images often portrayed North African women, their bodies bared except for the elaborate jewelry adorning them.

These postcards were not mere visual records; they were tools of commodification, manufactured to feed the Orientalist desires of French soldiers and Western tourists. They cynically exploited the bodies of women who, in reality, carried untold histories and ancestral knowledge.

This discovery unsettled me. I realized that the image I had carried of my cultural inheritance—the ornaments, garments, and tools I had once romanticized—had been shaped by a colonial lens. The world I thought I came from was a carefully staged illusion. The authentic traditions of my family, it seemed, had been silenced.

From this rupture grew a deep sense of estrangement. And from that estrangement, I began to create. This dislocation became the conceptual ground of my practice—a space from which I could reimagine, reconstruct, and reclaim.

In my search for the jewelry crafted by my forebears, I came to understand that jewelry is more than adornment. It is fossilized narrative—material memory preserved through centuries, bearing witness to vanished worlds.

Today, I see myself not only as a craftswoman, but as a guardian of cultural echoes. My work is guided by the belief that the pieces I create will endure as honest relics of our time—quiet yet persistent, like ancient whispers etched in silver.

What once began as frustration has become reverence, devotion, and love—for this alchemical art that binds metal, memory, and meaning.

 

 

What moves me most about the world of jewelry is its eternal presence—its ability to transcend time and speak across millennia.

Jewelry survives long after language, buildings, or even names have disappeared. It offers archaeologists and historians a rare, tangible entry point into cultures that have vanished. A single bead can unravel the rituals, desires, and daily lives of forgotten individuals.

I am especially fascinated by prehistoric jewelry—how it is often unearthed still clinging to human remains, as if unwilling to be separated. These ornaments, embedded in the skeletons of their wearers, become enduring biographies. They testify not only to the individual who wore them, but to the world they inhabited—their migrations, mythologies, and aesthetics.

When a burial site reveals beads made of shells sourced from distant shores, it speaks of journey and exchange. It offers not just personal memory, but communal history—a map etched in ornament.

The labor of creating beads from bones, seeds, or stones was immense. It demanded skill, time, and devotion. This challenges the modern image of early humans as mere survivors. Instead, we glimpse them as makers—artists who honored symmetry, ornament, and symbolic meaning.

It is no wonder that the motifs and forms crafted tens of thousands of years ago still resonate in today’s fashion. Shells and conches, worn 150,000 years ago, continue to appear in contemporary collections by the world’s most renowned designers.

To create within this ancient visual tradition is both a profound challenge and a quiet act of reverence. I strive to respond to that lineage not by replicating it, but by breathing new life into it—infusing it with questions, dreams, and present-day urgency.

The uniqueness of my work lies in its dialogue with archaeological memory. I have developed a personal technique for crafting imagined fossil-forms—sculptures in pure silver that evoke conches, shells, and bone-structures that never existed, yet feel deeply ancient.

Through this method, I explore the liminal space between skeleton and ornament, presence and absence, decay and preservation. I hope that my pieces speak of the body not just as a site of adornment, but as a keeper of time.

 

 

My jewelry is constructed from layers of pure silver. I cut their edges into straight lines, forming hundreds of rods that are joined at their base. Each rod is individually shaped and soldered with great precision onto the next layer, creating a complex, architectural structure.

In some of these rods, I formed round hollows of varying sizes, which function as miniature settings for oxide. These allow me to selectively blacken parts of the silver.

I believe the judges connected not only with the scarred, visceral presence of the jewelry, but also with the sustainable nature of my process: a technique that leaves behind no material waste or metal shavings.

The five pieces that received the Preziosa Young award are part of a larger jewelry series I have been developing over the past year, titled Conchylomania.

This series reflects on a 17th-century practice documented by Dutch painters: the act of stealing conches and shells from colonial territories and placing them on display in Europe.

The term Conchylomania was coined to justify such looting as a form of romantic obsession—an aesthetic addiction to the collection and classification of shells.

I find profound symbolism in the theft of objects whose very function in nature is to serve as a home, a refuge, a place of protection.

The fractured, imaginary shells I have created stand as monuments to crushed lives, to disrupted ecosystems, to species and cultures that have been erased.

I created this series amid the brutal war currently unfolding in my homeland. The images of homes destroyed and looted in Gaza, Lebanon, and Israel merged in my imagination with the broken shells—no longer able to shield those who sought shelter within them.

 

The act of creating a piece of jewelry is, for me, deeply personal and intimate. I devote long days to each one—immersing myself in careful labor and quiet research—with the hope that the final piece will be singular, innovative, and evocative.

But as a young artist at the beginning of my journey, I often find myself uncertain. The process feels like navigating a vast sea without a compass: committing myself fully to a direction I believe in, and trusting it will lead somewhere meaningful.

That is why receiving the Preziosa Young award holds such deep significance. It affirms that I am moving in the right direction, that leading voices in the field see value in what I am making.

More than an honor, this recognition gives me renewed confidence in my artistic path. At this early stage in my career, what matters most are the opportunities this award opens: to exhibit my work in significant galleries and on influential platforms in the field of contemporary jewelry.”

 

Yasmin Zehavi