The Arts, Football and Society

The Athletic Club Foundation, in collaboration with Sala Rekalde, has organized a cycle of conferences titled ‘Arte(s), Futbol y Sociedad'(The Arts, Football and Society). It consists of three lectures, in two of which a video on the subject of football -widely understood, as a social phenomenon- as seen from the arts will also be presented.

The first lecture will be given by artist Pablo España, a member of the group Democracia. With headquarters in Madrid, Democracia made an intervention in 2009 along with hooligans of the Girondins from Bordeaux through which slogans and banners of social tendency were exhibited in a league match; such as ‘Don’t let yourselves be consoled; The truth is always revolutionary; Idols don’t exist; They rule because we obey; We have nothing but our time; Pain is the only nobility; The main battlefield is your enemy’s mind’.

The event, with the title ‘Ne vous laissez pas consoler/don’t let yourselves be consoled’, was documented in a seventeen-minute video that would be emitted during the cycle. Likewise, Pablo España will present the work ‘There are no spectators’, made in collaboration with fans of the Chilean team Santiago Wanderers from Valparaiso.

The second lecture will be carried out by Naïm Aït-Sidhoum and Guillaume Ballandras, members of the PiedLaBiche group, which is made up of artists, architects and writers from Paris, Grenoble and Lyon and whose works reflect on urban space and its uses. Their conference will be used to present the work ‘Refait’ (‘Remake’), a video that considers the idea of how football comprises the imaginary group of a country and how a fact that occurred on the football pitch of a stadium works as a twist in time, returning over and over to the memory of thousands of people.

For this, PiedLaBiche reconstructed the images, shot by shot on a 27-minute video, of the penalty shoot-out between Germany and France in the 1982 World Cup, which the French lost. The recreation of the images, however, is through scenes of daily life in Lyon, which are presented simultaneously as that penalty shoot-out was emitted by French television.

On the other hand, the PiedLaBiche group will also present another video that gathers how in the 2009 Lyon Biennial they created a consistent event by organizing a football match on a three-goal, hexagonal pitch; a collective action of popular participation thought to illustrate a way of overcoming the classic dichotomies of western thinking.

Finally, the third and last conference of the cycle will be given by Argentine writer Pablo Nacach, author of, among other books, the essential “Fútbol, la vida en domingo” /Fooball, life on Sunday”) (Lengua de Trapo, 2006). Under the title of “Life on Sunday: football, the arts and contemporary thinking”, Nacach will deal with the relationship between football and visual culture, and how these take root in the imaginary contemporary group. Pablo Nacach has a PhD from the University of Barcelona and a Bachelor’s in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires.