Climat Continental
Bourses déliées, Group show
Halle Nord
Geneva (CH)
2025
Climat Continental, single channel video 15'59
In the labyrinth of documentary practice, the artist's manipulation of raw material—images, sounds, found and fabricated—navigates a fine line between revelation and obfuscation. This reflects the impossible ideal of Ken and Flo Jacobs, pioneering structuralist filmmakers: The perfect film is an unaltered, unedited creation, a pristine artefact that invites exploration. Jacobs' ideal presents a tantalising yet elusive goal: a document that serves as a portal, more freehanded in its invitation than one heavily fabricated.
This utopian vision of unfettered truth collides with the somewhat messy reality of artistic intervention. The documentarian, like Orpheus leading Eurydice from the underworld, must grapple with the temptation to look back, to reshape, to impose narrative. The very act of framing, of deciding where to point the camera or showing found footage, is of course an authorial choice laden with consequence.
Janet Malcolm's critique of journalism as an "impossible profession" resonates with the documentary dilemma. Her exploration of reportage's ethical deadends finds its cinematic parallel in the editing room, where artists wrestle with representing subjects truthfully while crafting compelling stories.
The documentary form, then, becomes a battleground where competing imperatives clash: the drive for authenticity versus the need for structure, the raw power of unmediated footage against the clarifying, even prophetic force of montage. This tension gives rise to a wide range of approaches, from the observational purity of Frederick Wiseman to the hands-on re-shuffling of Ken Okiishi.
Essentially, the artist's hand can both illuminate and distort. Perhaps the most profound documentaries are the ones acknowledging their limitations, inviting viewers into the process of meaning-making. Ultimately, the power of documentary lies not in its claim to absolute truth, but in its capacity to unsettle or ignite curiosity. In an age of (mis)information overload and algorithmic echo chambers, the documentary's role as an active companion for exploration and critique feels more vital today than ever.
Though Yul Tomatala's practice spans multiple mediums, from images to installations, his work consistently follows the logic of generating ‘documents’—whether through film or other forms of visual storytelling. Tomatala's approach echoes Anne Carson's probing of truth as a conundrum in Cassandra Float Can, where she suggests that something truly new, something prophetic, must initially appear unbelievable—otherwise, it is merely another source among many. This conundrum, the veil of meaning that slowly peels back, layer by layer, mirrors Tomatala's method of revealing truth. His work is less about immediate clarity and more about allowing meaning to accrue gradually, drawing the viewer into a deeper engagement with what might initially seem elusive or obscured.
Tomatala's work strikes the right balance of intervention and restraint. His images become a tool for revelation, not through heavy-handed manipulation, but through careful attention to the minutiae that make an event eventful. In his hands, the everyday becomes essential. Yet, even as he illuminates these hidden corners of reality, Tomatala never loses sight of a larger context, the universal themes or events that connect individual stories to a larger, collective experience. His use of language is sparse yet incisive, both conjuring and categorising—a tool of division—that mirrors the apparent triviality of watching Air India and SriLankan Airlines planes queue behind British Airways on the tarmac, or the mundane ritual of a 'continental' breakfast in a Heathrow hotel, now a symbol of the pervasive divisiveness in our globalised world.
Tomatala's most recent video work (Climat Continental, 2024) offers a potential resolution to the dilemmas posed by Jacobs and Malcolm. It demonstrates that the "perfect" documentary may not be an unaltered artefact, but rather a carefully constructed provocation—a work that acknowledges its own subjectivity while opening doors to contradictions. In Tomatala's work, vanity and tenderness, mediocrity and warmth, obscurity and clarity coexist, creating a tangle of connections and breaks on screen. Tomatala invites us into this space of ambiguity and possibility where the potential of a document lies not in absolute truth, but in its ability to be meaningful, precisely by snatching a fragment of life from contemporary limbo. His films compel us to look deeper, question further, and embark on our own quests for understanding. In challenging us to reconsider our relationship to reality, media, fiction, and the act of witnessing—be it the crack of dawn or the crash of global infrastructure—Tomatala not only perceives and documents but also offers a space for meditation on the artist's responsibility as both critic and participant. Ultimately, Tomatala's work suggests that to catch the straight scoop, we need the whole scoop—no less than the entirety of the clues—presented in a way that acknowledges the complexity of our world and yet is naturalistic and expressionist at the same time.
Gianmaria Andreetta
Photo © Thomas Maisonnasse
Photo © Thomas Maisonnasse
Photo © Thomas Maisonnasse
Photo © Thomas Maisonnasse
Photo © Thomas Maisonnasse
Photo © Thomas Maisonnasse