If, as argued by Johan Huizinga, it is a fact that the instinct of play pervades and feeds all human endeavours, and that its essential characteristics are “being freedom itself” and “escaping from ‘real’ life”, then for Eduardo Coimbra football is, of all games, the game; it is the practice of freedom and of the necessary escape from “real life”. And the poetic justification for the global unanimity of this sport rests, above all, on the planetary shape of the ball, the mobile and elastic centre of the desire of anyone who plays or merely watches a football match. Or has the reader still not realised that the ten most popular sports are ALL played with a ball?

The amplitude and magnitude of the events triggered by a football match confirm the impassioned choice of Eduardo Coimbra, artist and Vasco da Gama fan: of all the sports, football is the one that pulls the biggest crowds into the stadiums, while at the same time captivating much larger crowds, only dissipated, in front of televisions. At the centre of everyone’s attention, from the players to the spectators: the ball.

Playing alone with a ball, adjusting the body to the ball’s intentions and at the same time trying to adjust the ball to our own intentions implies the momentary abandonment of the reality around us. Absorbing oneself with a ball equates to falling in love with a susceptible, capricious being, who is quite averse to taming, and above all, very, very egotistic, although far from needy. It is an inexplicable passion, that erupts at a very early age, when we have hardly started to crawl. One need only contemplate a child entertaining himself with it, bursting with laughter, surprised by its disjointed bounces, to understand why the ball is a substitute for the pillow or cuddly toy. According to an informed study by sports journalist, Paulo Vinicius Coelho, the superstar footballer Neymar, at the age of eight, kept thirty balls of all different kinds in his bedroom.

Ball control, and practicing it, is a process that requires focus, concentration, an almost total blocking out of everything else, apart from the wall against which it is kicked, the bat or club with which it is hit, the empty goal targeted from a distance. In the capacity of an object that invites the body to move, in the case of football, the ball is ecumenical and universal; it is the ball that catalyses the shot, that atavistic gesture, probably born the day after we came down from the trees and started to walk.  

The ball can come in several and variable forms: from the modern day official ones, made of synthetic leather, colourful and emblazoned with eye-catching emblems, patters and trimmings, in the size and weight according to the modality of the sport – 11-a-side, 7-a-side, futsal, beach football – to the bog standard balls made of rubber or cheap plastic, which rapidly deform. Like everything, the ball can be extracted or reinterpreted from a virtually infinite choice of materials, starting with the classic and nostalgic sock ball, made of cloth, filled with paper, sawdust or whatever one has at hand. Whether deformed, asymmetrical, oblong, oval, heavy and hard, stiff and light, or soft and insubstantial, like the paper balls that are gradually destroyed amid chair wheels during office lunch breaks, every ball has its worth, its own personality, seeing as its tricks bring out physical skills that would otherwise remain buried.

For those afflicted by ball fever, by the impulse to deal with something entirely detached from oneself with the aim of making it part of oneself, a portable appendix, for those who cannot resist the obsession to try and control a ball, kick it, ping it, launch it, shoot it against a target, for those who, with it at their feet, insist on rehearsing, however clumsily, choreographies of striding forwards, of dribbling defenders, be them visible or invisible, playing along or indifferent, anything is used as a ball, transformed into a ball, seen as a ball.

For some time I have been honing a certain obsession. At first I would kick everything I stumbled upon. The desire was to kick. A piece of paper, a cigarette butt, another piece of paper. Any mark on the pavement caused me to practice my footwork. Then it was no longer pieces of paper, corks, match boxes. I don’t know when I started to have the subtle taste inside. I only know that it started. And I carry on working on it, valuing the simplicity of the movements, a beauty that I seek to extract from the most ordinary details of my art being refined.

Kicking bottle tops that I find on the way.

João Antonio – Afinação da arte de chutar tampinhas [Honing the art of kicking bottle tops]

Thanks to the obsessive omniscience of the footballer, the ball is everywhere; and it’s clear that, when the first photograph of our planet came to light, many imagined the possibility of an interplanetary kickabout.

When all is said and done, playing with a ball has quite a lot to do with dancing and quite a lot to do with boxing. With dancing, especially when practiced unaccompanied, by virtue of giving oneself up to the music, to its rhythms and intensities, to the sensation of being incorporated by something that comes from out there, that grabs one by the skin, that penetrates one’s pores. With boxing, because the ball does not exactly represent a partner, but rather an opponent full of malice. Just look at its deliciously reproachable behaviour in the presence of unskilful players: it attacks them, not striking them, but humiliating them in the form of ungracious movements that it forces them to execute, laying bare their ungainly nature, making them chase it in shambolic runs, provoking involuntary stumbles. The craque (star player) is he who has an intimate understanding with the ball, and whom, according to Nelson Rodrigues, the ball recognises, licking his feet like a puppy. On the other hand, when faced with an enemy, a donkey, a blunderer, the ball does not hesitate in showing just how genius the ridiculous can be.

It’s easy to understand the reason why games based on disputing a ball were created. Just as the point is the first element of Euclidean geometry, the embryo of all abstract constructs, the organization of groups and of the establishment of rules about what is done with the ball are the natural developments of its condition.

Football in the Expanded Field – title of Eduardo Coimbra’s show in which he gathers eight football stadiums, eight variations of football expressed in eight totally different models as regards rules, number of teams and players, dimensions and formats of the pitches, dimensions and formats of the stadia – makes of the football match the starting point for other games. From the tactical geometries intrinsic to its rules, to the chalk-drawn straight and curved lines, through which the external and internal boundaries of the pitch are demarcated, the green turf exchanges its apparent unity for hierarchical spaces. Ball, pitch, dividing lines, players, referees and rules compose the architecture of football; a microcosm capable of binding together huge crowds, of sending them into ecstasy, of transforming them into furious hordes.

Expanding the horizon of the games, Eduardo Coimbra causes the game of football to be permeated by the game of art, the game of languages, of human expression and sensibility, all full of highly subtle rules, subject to change over the course of time. The artist develops this game by presenting eight objects fixed to the wall, eight pieces that are simultaneously paintings, sculptures and scale models – which is the same as saying that they don’t actually fall into any of these categories. Just as, in the fateful World Cup hosted by our country, the German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer amazed the world playing sweeper-keeper, just as, in the same tournament, the TV cameras started to define the results of matches with images that reached beyond the human eye’s capabilities, the game of art undergoes continuous transformations, incorporating themes, attitudes and processes that, in principle, have nothing to do with it.

In the case of football and these eight stadiums, everything is borne of the ball, it is the ball that gives rise to the construction of meanings of varying orders, that transcend the physical dimension to entangle it in a greater and intricate universe, beyond the field and the players: the colour and designs of the kits, the fanatical support of the fans, the colourful characters of the coaches and chairmen, the players transfer market, the economics of a production chain of unimaginable proportions.

This entire web results from the versatility of football, from its socializing ontology, as a low-cost source of superlative joy, from the ease with which one adapts to the strict dimensions of a sports court, to the awkwardly marked out little pitches on wasteland, on streets, even on slopes, with the lines scratched in chalk or brick, or simply invisible, an ongoing theme in claims and disputes – it’s gone out! it stayed in!! – and even in the domestic areas of houses and blocks of flats, suited to training the basics alone or to classic kickabout games – three on three, two on two, one on one, Wembley or 3-and-in. These can be played in yards, in passageways between walled buildings, or inside houses with smaller, sometimes soft, balls, in hallways or corridors between rooms, using the door frames as goals, or between the legs of a chair, driving mothers up the wall and jeopardizing the integrity of windows, mirrors, furniture and every breakable trinket that surrounds us.

From the clássico at the Maracanã – the arena – to solitary keepy-uppies, football expresses our ability to create games, to establish rules and immersing ourselves in them. And that it has something of the science of achievement is far from an irrelevant details, that it assumes tactics, strategies, cleverness, physical force and tricks for one group to breach the target defended by the other is a symptom of how transcendental it is, it is the reason why teams are called nations. That is why, when Eduardo Coimbra brings his paintings, which are also sculptures, which are also scale models, of new and imaginary football configurations, he is playing with art and at the same time playing with our ability to conceive games; hence, expanding our most loved game. Precisely as we do with our lives, no more, no less.

2014

obs: text written for the catalog of the Futebol no Campo Ampliado (Football in the Expanded Field) exhibition, held in Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, in June 2014