Necrològiques

Necrològiques is a piece by Yaya Tur that consists of a video installation, a sculptural cubicle that houses a set furnished in a manner typical of any domestic surroundinfs and a portrait in oils, concluding with a small video screening.

As we look deeper into this set of referents, we are led towards the staging of a particular act, the reading of a will.

It is like going up to The Thirteenth Floor[1], where a moment's simulation invades the present reality.

Other pieces by Yaya Tur considered the conduct of the post-capitalist social being, and their attitudes and deficiencies, or reflected a human condition that laments, struggles, is struck dumb, etc., in the quaest for happiness. In Necrològiques, however, the will itself is seen as a preliminary to death, and factors such as cynism and irony are fully present in the dramatisation, qualified by the serious device that provides the setting of the dramatic event and snooping into the prize draw, as it were, that destructures the script gives the viewer an image of the supposedly dead person, Yaya Tur, below the material surroundings.

This group of elements is complemented by an intervention in newspapers: the reading os the will in the Sala Petita of La Capella is announced in the Obituaries column. However, the mass of fatalistic factors does not come to an end here: the date of the opening, Tuesday the 13th (which in Spain is an unlucky date, like Friday the 13th in the English-speaking world), must also be added.

Yaya Tur's will therefore appears as a "moment" perpetrated by an enfant gâté, in which the artist plays with the protocol of death and defines his existencial development through the acquired, structured and delimited background that shapes our identity and which makes us social beings. 

As a result of the use in the world of the image of "consumables" that affect the sphere of art, with the frivolity typical of any urban kid, the reading of the will becomes more than a dramatic event and acquires a morbid curiosity that is transformed into an insubstancial poetic component.

Joan Morey

[1] Film by Roland Emmerich. 1999.