Photo © Yuri Dojc

Košice, Slovakia

Pentagram

After spending more than a decade photographing forgotten remnants of the Holocaust across his native Slovakia, artist Yuri Dojc turned to Daniel Weil, a partner at design consultancy Pentagram, to create a traveling exhibition for the resulting documentary project, Last Folio. This summer, the photographs—close-ups of moldering Hebrew texts found in an abandoned school, images of vacant synagogues’ peeling interiors, and portraits of aged survivors—were displayed at a derelict synagogue in Košice. “This is a witness, a recording, a document,” Weil says. When designing the display cases for the exhibition, first presented at the Gonville and Caius Library at the University of Cambridge in 2009, Weil envisioned delicate wood-framed, glassless volumes that would evoke disappearance and memory. Remarkably—perhaps magically—the geometry of the Košice synagogue was almost identical to Last Folio’s original venue at Cambridge. The effect is haunting: the ethereal vitrines blend into the decaying architecture like a silent congregation. “Every year, after you finish reading the Torah, you scroll it back and start again—the return,” Weil explains. “There was the idea that the synagogue of Košice was that return.”