Vuk Ćosić is a Slovenian contemporary artist associated with the net. art movement commemorates the Jews murdered during the Holocaust in Ljubljana. The project is called “Undeleted” uses photos of residents of the Slovenian capital that have been reconstituted as concrete poetics with Hebrew letter forms. He created their faces by combining faces with their presumed name.
Ćosić says: “The city is a subtle memory storage medium. A walk down the streets is the act of reading the forgotten. The project “Undeleted” is the missing instrument that finally gives us access to our neighbors deleted by holocaust. Let me explain.
ASCII city posters work better than in the gallery –- what looks like an image from afar quickly becomes something you read with another mental tool. Exactly same thing happens to people who quickly switch from geography of Ljubljana to the geography of concentration camps that swallowed the victims. It’s a trick.
Of the twenty three victims we only had ten photographs so I needed to develop a method of poetic fakes – I gave the search engine the names and family names of deleted Ljubljana Jews. From the result I chose those whose faces and lives rhymed with the stories of our neighbors. My programming friend Marko Plahuta calculated the average faces that I then converted to Hebrew ASCII. Dispersed and atomized memory of neighbours was recomposed into recogniszeable portraits.
Another connotation worth mentioning is the yellow ribbon used by Word that is now suddenly getting a fresh/old meaning. Nothing in the present saves us from the repetition of the past.”
