Some 400 works about football (US, soccer) have been brought together at the MuCEM, in Marseille, including photographs. It’s a cultural event that offers a perspective on a sport that has become a universal passion.
The soccer ball has made it into a French national museum. What better place than Marseille to host such an event? The city lives to the rhythm of its football club. When they win, everyone rejoices. When they lose, everyone’s mourning. Olympique de Marseille, or simply OM, is everywhere: on the storefronts of delis and cafés and on the bedroom walls of kids and grownups; on posters, banners, scarves, even tattoos. There is no medium unworthy of displaying support for this Massalian club. Daring the impossible is in their blood. By hosting We Are Football, the MuCEM has taken up the challenge of bringing together stadium- and museum-goers in one and the same space.
“The European intelligentsia tends to view football as a sport enjoyed by the few, or even by outcasts. As if kicking a ball, or yet a tin can, were an expression of vile nature. By denying it its artistic character, the intelligentsia has turned it into the birthright of violent bawlers who support super-rich, spoiled, and most likely doped-up kids. By stigmatizing the sport and reducing it to caricature, they ostracize its popular spirit.”
With a visual jumble of the world of football, the exhibition looks at all the facets of this sport. Thanks to over 400 works (objects, photos, installations, and videos) from its own collections as well as those of other museums, football federations, private collectors, and obtained through calls for donations, the MuCEM pays a tribute to football and the popular culture developed around it, in the Mediterranean region and in city of Marseille. From contemporary photography by Omar Victor Diop to black-and-white images of Italian ultras taken by Daniele Segre, to Floor Weesling’s identity-challenging photomontages, the curators aim to expand our horizons and look at society through the prism of soccer fields. From stadiums to neighborhoods, from mosque courtyards to concentration camps, football is a sport, but above all a world onto itself, or even the universe in a nutshell: it contains poverty, violence, independence, colonialism, success, politics, friendship, feminism, resistance, revolution, collectivity, individualism, and racism. All these terms are enacted in and around the football pitch. We Are Football is just one reflection of that world.
Sabyl Ghoussoub
Sabyl Ghoussoub is a journalist and photographer. Between 2011 and 2015, he was the director of the Lebanese film festival in Beirut.
Nous sommes foot / We Are Football
October 11, 2017 to February 4, 2018
MuCEM
7 Promenade Robert Laffont
13002 Marseille
France
