© Giovanni Ambriosio, 'Gioventù Ultras', 2016-2021
The MuFoCo - Museum of Contemporary Photography in Cinisello Balsamo (Milan) proposed until 24 October 2021, the exhibition “Chi non salta. Football, Culture, Identity” curated by Matteo Balduzzi. "Chi non salta" shows works of over 30 artists whose investigation, carried out through different languages, methods, and perspectives, revolves around the role that football has taken on in our society. Football is a chance to observe culture, thus ourselves. The visitor is led to examine a historical and social landscape, therefore human, and is tickled to think of the widespread diffusion of this sport that animates territories. The curatorial choice, which excludes from the in-depth analysis what the author Sebastien Louis defines "the recreational industry", or the football business and the connected star system, proposes reading perspectives that associate football with culture, art, and the construction of individual and collective identity.
'CHI NON SALTA', Installation view, MuFoCo, Milano 2021
The exhibition and the dialogue between the selected works is an invitation to abandon the cliché that keeps the football phenomenon at a distance from the strictly cultural vocabulary. Through a choral articulation of distinct authorial productions and different and fluidly orchestrated voices, a socio-anthropological vision takes shape, and therefore a broader cultural one understood as a primarily human capacity and tendency to leave traces, to produce ruins, materials, work, language, and objects. These inventories are social, made available to the community, and, as such, they become the fulcrum of shared knowledge, education, and training.
'CHI NON SALTA', Installation view, MuFoCo, Milano 2021
© Giulia Iacolutti, 'I don't care (about football)', 2021
© Davide Baldrati, 'Io sono Rummenigge', 2013
The introduction "Football and art", focusing on unusual combinations, starts the exhibition. Such as, for example, the one carried out by the sports association A.S. Velasca, created in 2015 and made up of international artists and amateur footballers who currently play in the third category championship. The idea behind the foundation of this football reality is openly and visually that of combining football with art, resorting to the intervention of influential contemporary artists who design the shirts worn by the players and make unique elements such as the captain's armband, the substitutions' board, the match posters, and so on. The intersection between art and football bears fruits with an unusual flavor that overcomes borders and flags—an intent to be pursued and logic to be practiced. The dispute of a friendly becomes, for example, an opportunity for new and fertile collaborations and opportunities for building bridges and relationships between different cultures and otherwise distant football realities.
'CHI NON SALTA', Installation view, MuFoCo, Milano 2021
Between the first and second floors of the MuFoCo, the works are entrusted to another polarity: football watched and played. To take us through the exhibition levels, a photograph by Federico Garolla from 1960, part of the Anthological Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, portrays Pier Paolo Pasolini playing football with some boys in the peripheral fields of Centocelle district of Rome. The poet and intellectual represents a point of reference in the development of the exhibition and is present continuously in the various exhibition moments. Pasolini can be traced back to a profound tension between the life lived, and life told, or made wise through words and artistic practice. The oscillation between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, between being actors and spectators of the game of life. If Pasolini bears witness to these oppositions by embodying, with his own life experience, an irremediable existential split, what emerges in the exhibition is instead the possibility of dancing, in a total absence of solutions of continuity, between things and words: football, art, culture, identity, a material and ideal leitmotif that avoids inextinguishable clashes or serious disputes.
Roma, 1960. Pier Paolo Pasolini plays soccer with kids in the neighborhood Centocelle. © Federico Garolla
On the first floor of the Museum, the fans are the subject of the "watched football" section, or what we could define as the show within the show. The viewer is also observed, seen, recognizable and active. Through the various forms of participation in which it expresses itself, the public is the recipient and the unavoidable accomplice of the game itself. What would be the nature of these events without the audience, either live, improvised, virtual, or fictitious? Would the game still exist as such? The ecstasy and the spasm, the joy and pain expressed in typically ritual situations, to whom do they belong if not to the relationship between those who play the game as an actor and the spectator?
'CHI NON SALTA', Installation view, MuFoCo, Milano 2021
The impossibility of considering the audience as a mere passive or non-fundamental counterpart of the representation itself is made paradigmatic by phenomenon within phenomenon: Hooliganism called Ultras in Italy. The first floor opens up "Gioventù Ultras", an exhibition by the photographer Giovanni Ambrosio and the sociologist, historian, and writer Sébastien Louis. The collaboration among the two, began in 2016, lead to the creation of an archive on ultras culture in different parts of the world and to a project, the one presented at MuFoCo, which represents a selection of heterogeneous materials capable of restoring complexity and breadth of the ultras reality between aesthetic dimension and anthropological investigation. Among the various materials presented, the portrait of an ultras fan flanked by photographs that show his home as if it were a temple, a place of worship in which to find objects, and images that symbolize one's football faith. On the bedside table the sacred text: "Ultras: Gli altri protagonisti del calcio" by Sèbastien Louis (Meltemi Editore, 2015).
© Giovanni Ambriosio, 'Gioventù Ultras', 2016-2021
And suppose it is true, as Nietzsche says, that the depth is the surface. In that case, it becomes interesting to keep observing what football culture produces and its effectiveness in replacing traditional forms of religious origin. In this regard, it's worth considering Ando Gilardi's work on display on the second floor of the museum, in the last section, which is dedicated to playing football. Here are the photographs that the artist took after the mid-1950s in the villages of Albano di Lucania and Venosa Jonica, in Southern Italy. They prove the widespread and constant presence of football practice in social life and in the urban structures of that landscape and historical setting. Not secondary to the photographic work is the explicit reference in the exhibition to the fact that Ando Gilardi's research work was the result of a trip to the South undertaken with the sociologist Ernesto De Martino who in those years was investigating issues such as ritual, magic and the concept of "presence". The latter refers to the "possibility of being in a human history".
© Antonio Gilardi, 'Albano di Lucania, 1967
Hence the need for the ritual. The loss of rituals takes away the meaning of acting and being together and constituting ourselves as a community. It is a need and a desire for meaning to make us human. The mirroring reference to something else from us is constitutive of the definition of oneself, of the construction of individual and, therefore, collective identity. The stereotyped moments of the rites offer models to follow, spaces in which to experience oneself and the other, places in which to approach what is known and what is unknown simultaneously. The acts, gestures, and ritual situations are here understood as reassuring spaces to experience and learn, in a mediated way, a life that is quivering and elusive in itself. Life would not give rise to cultural traditions if it did not assume visible, tangible, and metaphorical forms. The necessary experience is such in the present and gets lost if not told and formalized in shared practices through the primary act of symbolic language. Life happens, and we give it meaning by sharing it because we cannot be separated, as Aristotle teaches. It's the society as a fact of being together, the culture that we all contribute to producing, that make man and the community understood as "one in the many" and "the many in one".
© Marco Previdi, 'Poli ultras', 2019
© Marco Previdi, 'Poli ultras', Installation view, 'CHI NON SALTA', MuFoCo, Milano, 2021
In Quasi un testamento, Peter Dragadze's interview with the poet published posthumously in "Gente" on November 17, 1975, Pasolini says: "I have believed for many years that a recipient of my confessions and my testimonies existed. I have, therefore, now realized that it does not exist. There is no need to express oneself with poetry with friends: one tells oneself by existing. One's exaggerations, excesses, ideas are defined by living. Poetry requires a society (ie, an ideal recipient) capable of dialogue with the poor poet. In Italy, there is no such a society."
A life lived on the one hand and culture on the other. An identified me and a society that does not reflect me in "my" supposedly separate identity. What if the terms in question were instead the sides of the same coin? What would happen if it were a gaze to capture depth on what appears on the surface to indicate a perspective that describes us, as the football culture? The exhibition "Chi non salta" can be experienced as an invitation not to get lost in the distinctions of value between "high" and "low", remaining light, willing to leap and firm in agreeing to the Heraclitean fragment that reads: "The way up and the way down are one and the same."
© Matteo de Mayda, 'La prima volta', 2021
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CHI NON SALTA
Calcio. Cultura. Identità, curated by Matteo Balduzzi
Artists: Andrea Abati, Giampietro Agostini, Giovanni Ambrosio e Sébastien Louis, Autopalo / Gli Impresari, Davide Baldrati, Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Walter Battistessa, Ruth Beraha, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Mario Cattaneo, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Cesare Colombo, The Cool Couple, Mario Cresci, Matteo de Mayda, Emilio Deodato, Paola Di Bello, Vittore Fossati, Federico Garolla, Carlo Garzia, Ando Gilardi, Giulia Iacolutti, Giuseppe Iannello, Mimmo Jodice, Martino Marangoni, Paola Pagliuca, Piero Pozzi, Marco Previdi, Daniele Segre, Hans van der Meer, A.S. Velasca, Fulvio Ventura, Manfred Willmann
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