Fußball Ballet, Super 8mm Installation, Helium Balloons, 2023

A loop of Super 8mm film runs, suspended by helium balloons, through a projector. The loop is an excerpt from Fußball Ballet 2, a 1970 German film which used early film manipulation techniques combined with footage of the football World Cup to make the players appear to be performing ballet. 

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The work presents the actions of the men in the film as gestural, performative and theatrical. As they loop and repeat we consider the gendered nature of their movements. The film itself, levitating as it moves up to the helium balloons, is revealed to be light, thin, material and manipulated. The block on to which the image is projected is, by contrast, heavy, rooted and solid. The image sits between, neither of those things yet perhaps both of them . The imagery is both document and fantasy, the gestures genuine and performative. Masculine identities being confirmed and reconfirmed, true and false. The spectacle plays out; nostalgia, gender, performance, gesture. 

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Occupying the space, present but out of view, is a small, framed passport photo from the 1950s (pictured below).