Marco Mazzoni - Atlas Soccer
208 pages
Edited by Marco Mazzoni
26.5 x 18 cm
Language: English, Italian
Paperback
Publisher: Bruno
Edition of 300 copies
2016
A rich and diverse panorama of football gestures selected from newspapers' photographs dating from 1990 to 2010. The aesthetic classification of these gestures opens to wider reflections on sport as choreography and artistic performance.
Atlas Soccer is part of Atlas, a collection of images taken from newspapers and gathered from 1990 to 2010 and later filed by subject. The material, exclusively in paper format, was found by chance and collected without a particular reason other than the compulsive attraction to the photographic image. It was only later, in the filing process, that it has found its current form, a sort of map of the author's obsessions.
Atlas Soccer is different from other, more uniform, collections in that inside the soccer world there are an infinite series of sub-categories that can be traced back to the actions and gestures taking place on the 90 minutes of the match. This chain of gestures opens to wider reflections on performance and production. Every gesture goes beyond its primary nature of spontaneous action and into the hybrid territory of representation. Soccer players, modern heroes relentlessly followed by camera lenses, give vent to their narration in a chain of poses that find their outlet in the image itself, displaying forms dripping with erotism and involuntary history of art. The match becomes synonym with the world; its gestures being its subjective variant.