Tournament of the Unknown—Power Plays

Power Plays — 8 December, 20:00-21:30

During this evening film program we’ll be screening three works that engage with the geo-political, technological, and spatial underpinnings of sporting cultures—bringing the power plays in, and outside, the stadium in conversation with one another. Pia Lindman’s Thisplace examines how the built environment of the stadium relates to the social interaction it is designed to contain. In The Ball, The Field, The Arena, Florian van Zandwijk takes the game of football—the biggest globalised manifestation of organised play— as a metaphor for the inseparable relationship humans have with culture, play, and our own technological developments. And Ronnie Close’s More out of Curiosity, focuses on Egypt’s fanatical football supporters, the Ultras, in their role as one of the key players in emergent political debates.

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More out of Curiosity — Ronnie Close

26:07 minutes, single-screen,16:9, HD Digital Video, 2014.

One of the key players in the new emergent political debate are Egypt’s fanatical football supporters, the Ultras. Although affiliated to different teams in the domestic league they often joined forces in street protests to remove Hosni Mubarak in January 2011. The controversy over the 2012 Port Said incident when 72 Al-Ahly fans were killed in an orchestrated attack forced the Ultras back onto the streets. They mounted a successful political protest campaign against the state forces that culminated a year later in legal conviction and a sense of retribution.

More Out of Curiosity is a film work drawing on documentary narratives to frame the capacity of resistance in current social movements. This film is constructed from video footage drawn from a number of sources, including the Al-Ahly Ultras themselves who shared their video archive material. The assemblage of images of street protests, football games, riots and banner making helps stitch together a narrative to expose their unique local subculture in an overlapping meta-documentary format. The film work is bookended by the Port Said incident and the court verdict a year later. This structure is divided into seven scenes which define and categorize the video imagery. No voiceover resists the direct deciphering of the video material and the film operates on an instinctive, visceral level driven by a charged soundtrack.

Thisplace — Pia Lindman

This particular section of the series is the shot of the US Open. “Thisplace” is part of the NYMoMA collection (you should include courtesy of the artist and New York MoMA), 2002

Many of my video works focus on how the built environment relates to the social interaction it is designed to contain. I am using a video camera to record changes of light and movements in space and time. The video is filmed from a fixed camera position and the video footage is then made transparent and cut into one-minute segments. These segments are then layered on top of each other. During one minute the viewer sees the entire 60-minute video in real time, however simultaneously as multiple layers.

Among others, I have shot baseball stadiums and other sports arenas in New York, contrasting the monumental structure of the stadiums to the fluctuating density of the audience.

The Ball, The Field, The Arena — Florian van Zandwijk

18:41 minutes, single screen, 2019.

In his book Homo Ludens (1938) Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga suggests that play is both a primary and a necessary condition for generating culture. The game of football—the biggest globalised manifestation of organised play—is taken in The Ball, The Field, The Arena as a metaphor for the inseparable relationship humans have with culture, play, and our own technological developments. By zooming out from the ball to the field into the arena, the work shows that human culture is not only shaped via play but that our play is equally shaped by the technology we create—the two engaging in a mutual relationship with one another.