Yul Tomatala is a visual artist born in 1993 in Geneva, where he currently lives and works. His practice explores fragmented forms of narration through photography, video, and installation. In his work, he examines our relationship with the built environment, focusing particularly on the connections between architecture and media—especially on how our personal and collective memories are tied to them. By questioning the transformation of our relationship to space through mechanisms where notions of time, absence, and wandering play a central role, his work offers a non-linear analysis of reality through the reinterpretation of everyday situations and experiences that he observes, assembles, and recontextualizes. In this approach, documents and fiction merge, giving rise to a speculative and multi-layered reflection on modernity.
Among the various themes addressed in his work, the acceleration of the contemporary world and its consequences on our perception of space and time occupy a central place. Yul Tomatala is interested in what Paul Virilio called “dromology” – the logic of speed – and its effects on architecture, bodies, and memory. In his installations and videos, the frantic rhythms of contemporary society are often diverted or slowed down, revealing the residues of a world saturated by speed and images. Urban space, compressed by digital temporality, becomes a ghostly, almost suspended setting, where architecture carries an unstable memory.
After obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in Photography from ECAL in 2019, followed by two years as an academic assistant at the same institution, he continued his research within the Work.Master program at HEAD – Geneva, where he earned a Master’s degree in Visual Arts in 2023. Alongside his artistic practice, he has worked for several years as an iconographer at a Swiss television channel, where he produces, selects, indexes, and contextualizes visual content for broadcast. This role as a visual mediator within a public media outlet allows him to refine his sensitivity to narrative structures and the political impact of images. This experience nourishes his artistic work by reactivating archival figures, manipulating media corpora, and questioning the contemporary circulation of images.
Awarded the HES-SO Prize for Excellence in 2023, he received a grant from the Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain de Genève in 2024. His work has been exhibited in various independent art spaces in Switzerland, such as Hit in Geneva, WallStreet in Fribourg, Lokal-int in Biel, and Sgomento in Zurich, as well as in institutions including the Kunsthalle Appenzell, the CACY in Yverdon, and Salle Crosnier in Geneva. In 2024, he joined L’Abri – Geneva as an associate artist. He is also a member of the collective managing Espace3353 (2023–2025), an independent art space in Geneva. That same year, he joined the working group The Unfinished Business of Living Together, composed of cultural practitioners Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca Beeler, Nina Wakeford, Miriam Laura Leonardi, and Lithic Alliance, selected for the Swiss Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia 2026.