Six million

When finished, this piece will be the numbers from zero to six million written on sheets of paper. Six million is the number of Jews killed during the Second World War or, anyway, the number everybody remembers. (Depending on counting methods,the figure ranges between five million one hundred and six million.) It will be finished on 7th February 2O1O* if I write 15OO numbers a day. This means that I will take more than eleven years to write down the number of people killed in a period of four years.

I think six million is a number so big we cannot comprehend it. In materializing those six million I want each of those people to be remembered one by one. You have to think that behind each number there is a person with a family and a life, who has lived in hell and been killed for nothing, except to be born with the wrong parents, the wrong religion. All the survivors of concentration camp said that one of the most horrible thing was this lack of understanding, this injustice.

The nazi were dishumanizing the Jews, identifying them with a number tattooed on there arm as if they were animals. As they transformed people into numbers, I want to reverse the process and transform the numbers back into people. I chose to write the numbers in blue ink to remind us of the tattoos , writing on lined paper as if they were part of an accountancy form. Indeed, Nazis killed people in an economical and rational way, looking for rentability in the extermination as any industry.

I feel there is a point where horror is beyond representation, so I haven't even tried to represent. Sometime, suggestion is stronger than description and simpler things can have more impact. This is my way of remembering and make sure everyone else does.

London, November 1998-------------------------enter

*This prevision has been postponed to Septembre 24th 2O2O, as I am only writing 1OOO a day.