Yayo Tavolara

IRL- In Real Life

Social media has become one of the most regular and quicker ways to get information about roughly everything. I could risk saying, fast in every milieu.

Launched in our screens are both: private and trivial issues concerning others - most of them regarding totally unknown people - trying to illustrate a different reality of what their true life certainly is; and the so called official information, spread all around the internet, covering global real facts that cope to worldwide issues attempting to obtain the most original story to put out there in the picture.

This avalanche of information recalls society’s attention, confuses veracity with sensationalist fantasies that goes -so called- viral, and catches the interest of many scrolling addicts.

That was one of the trigger points that led me to find a way to evoke - through a visual project conformed by oil paint on linen, mixed with elements of old school communication items, like paper tags, envelops, garn etc - things happening in Syria, Africa, Europe, and other places of the globe, which are realities that need to be considered and seriously taken by us.

They are ongoing facts that many do not want to be aware of, because for several, it is easier to ignore what it is difficult to understand, or even accept.

This idea of representing current facts visually, using social media and Internet language as titles of the paintings, became a component of the subject matter for my last project IRL- In real life. I think the titles of these paintings - considering the fluency to social media language, almost by everyone - would create an easier platform to reflect, maybe for a moment, or possibly to change something genuine in their minds or life.

Definitely, there will be a so-called esthetic experience; a visual and an off line approach to the substantial others’ reality, like in real life.

Yayo Tavolara 

New technologies have given rise to a new society, a new approach and a new notion of space, not to say of distance and communications but most of all of one another’s presence.

We are near and immediate everywhere but actually nowhere. We have become a mirage of ourselves where our seemingly physical presence is but a virtual reality. We are all about being through the technological devices, the accessories of our contemporary day-to-day.  We live therefore in a world of interconnected individuals that are mostly isolated and lonely.

In view of the technological progress, the other’s presence, even our loved ones, is currently just an impression; screens capture our field of vision and action. The screen light prevents us from seeing what is really happening around us and frames our sight.

The way we perceive the outer world is restrained, conditioned by our body posture, which is practically primitive if not static.

I believe this subject matter concerns each and every one of us in these current times, regardless of our geographical location or ethnicity.

Throughout my work I have seeked to create various artistic proposals in different supports, I have therefore chosen two elements that, in my opinion, belong to the topical context that I have decided to analyze this time.

Mirage of Presence is an Installation where photography, video and ready-made interact.

Through this statement I intend to create a space for reflection, where the visitor becomes a viewer of the attitude and alienation that transcends when we are self-absorbed in our own private, virtual, physically inexistent worlds and oblivious of what surrounds us

Contemporary society is threatened by the constant fear of random aggression, resulting from terrorism and all the kinds of violence that arise from such things as the proliferation of weapons, rape, drug use, the trafficking of women, misogyny, wars, sickness, and the appearance of those new diseases that are impacting life and the environment.  It is easy to see how such issues can detract from the nurturing we expect from a peaceful society – which, in any case, no longer belongs to us.  At the same time, these forces are causing us to revert to our original uncivilized primitive state.

Currently, everywhere in this globalized world, people have to endure various forms of surveillance in order for a balance to be maintained between social ethics and progress.  Freedom, privacy, intimacy, and respect for the individual are at risk, because this sort of obsessive need for self- preservation, paradoxically creates a parallel self-alienation.  All these types of control are affecting our human emotions; we are constantly being judged on legal, technical, medical, economic, and political grounds, for considerations of a marital and religious nature, and even by immigration and customs officials.  I believe that this is leading society toward an imbalance and a loss of our personal space and dignity.

The concepts of control, power, change, and globalization were present in my previous projects, and in this one I am trying to incorporate symbols that, working together, could represent – according to my perceptions – the emotional transformation of psychological tensions, offering my individual interpretation of the strain between security, power and protection versus human values and personal rights.  To represent this, I am using a video screening of three different videos at the same time with images inspired by airport security gate control elements, such as the blue rubber gloves, the RX Scanner and images created with my own body.

In my own thinking, the impersonal antiseptic gloved hands represent the “violation” of some private rights and spaces. The “invasive” scan of the RX is the depiction of an offensive controlling action. The enclosed body, projected into a brick-installation space (representing the domestic and human privacy) is the symbol of the daily life tension, under any kind of controlled systems where freedom and self-development as a human right are hindered.