How one LA artist turned telephone poles, voicemails, and the concept of the human soul into the most provocative art project in years.
There is a particular kind of artist who does not wait for the gallery to open its doors. They go straight to the street, straight to the public, straight to the nerve. RABI, born David Emanuel Mordechai Torres, is that kind of artist, and We Buy Souls is the definitive proof.
For four years, hand-made signs reading WE BUY SOULS have been appearing on telephone poles, construction walls, and urban surfaces across Los Angeles and beyond. Posted alongside the usual noise of cash-for-gold offers and junk removal flyers, they blend in just enough to make you do a double take. The signs include a phone number. Call it, and you are greeted by an eerie prompt: leave a voicemail. State the value of your soul. Explain why.
Over 40,000 people have called in.
The Archive of Human Vulnerability
What RABI has built is not a prank. It is not a stunt. It is one of the most quietly radical archives of human thought assembled in contemporary art. Forty thousand voicemails, confessions, negotiations, doubts, jokes, breakdowns, and deeply personal reckonings with self-worth, all triggered by a sign on a pole and a question nobody asks in polite society: What are you actually worth?
The project operates under the fictional corporate front WBS and The Entity LLC, a satirical shell that mirrors the faceless transactional language of late capitalism. It is dark comedy. It is social experiment. It is conceptual art firing on every cylinder.
Street Art, Live Art, Multimedia, All at Once
What makes We Buy Souls a work of genius is its refusal to sit inside a single genre. It is street art in the most literal sense: signs on walls, guerrilla placement, no permission asked. It is live art and performance: every voicemail is a live, unrehearsed act of participation from a stranger. It is multimedia installation: audio, video, sculpture, painting, and printed material all feed into the expanding universe of the project. And it is interactive technology: the voicemail hotline turns every caller into a collaborator, a performer, and a data point in a living, breathing archive.
The signs appear in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, reaching across linguistic and cultural boundaries with the same provocation. No single label contains it. That is the point.
From the Street to the Gallery
In January 2026, RABI brought We Buy Souls into a physical gallery space for the first time at Good Mother Gallery on West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles. The exhibition ran through February and transformed the white cube into what has been described as a bombastic, immersive world.
Posters in multiple languages lined the walls. Audio from the voicemail archive filled the room. Sculptures, paintings, photographs, and documentation mapped the project's four-year evolution. Official WE BUY SOULS contracts were available on-site for visitors to sign.
The Contracts
A limited edition monograph was published alongside the show, featuring project documentation, critical essays, and a foreword by the artist and philosopher Shantell Martin.
The Artist Behind the Provocation
RABI is a first-generation American of Puerto Rican and Polish descent, born and raised in Los Angeles. He came up through skateboarding and graffiti, co-founded the internationally recognized art collective CYRCLE in 2009, and spent over a decade building a practice that spans video, design, photography, painting, and sculpture. His work has appeared in major collections and museums, on the walls of the Urban Nation Museum in Berlin, and in collaborations with HBO, Uber, and Pharrell. In 2024, he was selected as the sole U.S. representative for HK Walls, Hong Kong's premier street art festival.
His trajectory has always pointed toward something bigger than murals. We Buy Souls is the arrival.
Why This Matters
We live in an era where every aspect of identity is monetized, packaged, and sold back to us. Attention is currency. Data is commodity. Belief systems are market segments. RABI takes that reality and strips it bare with a question so absurd it becomes profound: What if someone actually offered to buy your soul?
The fact that 40,000 people picked up the phone and answered, earnestly, desperately, hilariously, heartbreakingly, tells you everything about where we are as a society. The project does not lecture. It does not moralize. It simply opens a door and lets people walk through it.
That is the mark of a genius at work.
The Hotline Is Still Open
RABI's We Buy Souls is one of the most important art projects to emerge from Los Angeles in recent memory. The voicemail hotline is still active. The conversation is still open. Call in. Tell them what your soul is worth.
