August 2, 2018
The project bears the title "Undeleted - Reconstructed portraits of deleted Jewish fellow citizens of Ljubljana", with the posters being put near what were their last homes in the Slovenian capital.
While photographs of around half of the "deleted" Jews from Ljubljana have been preserved, Ćosić developed for the other half a special method of digital face reconstruction, which he dubbed "poetic fake".
He created their faces by combining photographs of the people with the same name and/or surname who lived in the approximately same period, which he found on the internet.
The author's theory is that deleted people live in the dispersed digital memory of the internet, and that they needed to be put together again, to be "undeleted".
Ćosić constructed the portraits from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet: looked at a poster from afar, the passer-by will see a face, which is turning into a text as the passer-by gets closer to the poster.
Photo: Judovski kulturni center Ljubljana / Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana
Photo: Judovski kulturni center Ljubljana / Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana
Photo: Judovski kulturni center Ljubljana / Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana
The series of poster portraits, which has been on display since 27 June, is meant to announce the installation of Stolpersteine, or "stumbling blocks", in Ljubljana.
Stolpersteine are concrete cubes bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution, a project initiated by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 (Wikipedia).
Photo: Christian Michelides CC-by-SA 4.0 Stolpersteine in Chodov
The "stumbling blocks" have since been installed in more than 610 cities in Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Norway and Ukraine. The first Stolpersteine in Slovenia were installed in Maribor in 2012.
Organised by the Jewish Cultural Centre (Judovski kulturni center) in cooperation with the Maribor Synagogue culture centre, Mini Teater and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU), Ljubljana is also to get its Stolpersteine soon.
The first part of the campaign will start on 6 August, with the memorial cubes being installed by Demnig together with President Borut Pahor and parliamentary Speaker Matej Tonin (Facebook event page).
The ceremony will mark the symbolic return of the first 23 Jewish citizens of Ljubljana and their relatives who were taken from their homes and brought to various concentration camps around Europe.
More than 90% of the Jewish community in Slovenia perished in the Holocaust, from which it has never recovered.
The installation of Stolpersteine will be followed by the opening of an installation in the Jewish Cultural Centre in Ljubljana dedicated to the 587 Slovenian victims of the Holocaust, followed by a lecture by Demnig.
