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MEG, mars 2012

Accueil > Expositions > Offside

Offside

From 21 May 2008 to 26 April 2009
MEG | Conches

Publication Version française

Long a magnet for crowds, football gained considerably in popularity in the 20th century and is today the premier global sport. With its rules and techniques, its artists zigzagging the field, its social and symbolic dimensions, it is a universal and at the same time very special world.

Maradona the God, Blatter the Pope and even Victoria Beckham the Courtesan welcome visitors to Conches and serve as their guides throughout the exhibition. These hybrid char-acters foster reflection on football as a mirror of various processes at work in the modern world. Indeed, far from being completely shuttered up, football's myriad windows, light up on broad swathes of our societies.

La scena. A la fin du match les joueurs de l'équipe de Juazeiro do Norte vont au pied de la statue de Padre Cicero, le prêtre miraculeux du Nordest du Brésil.
Juazeiro do Norte Oeara, Brésil, 1998 © Américo Mariano

In a concept that follows the fluid lines of a ball in play and crowd movements in the stands, the exhibition touches on topics such as man's capacity to produce and share emotions, the "celebrity" society, the social disparities, the construction of individual and collective identities, nationalism, the birth of new beliefs, the commodification of humans and the considerable financial stakes.

As part of its work to mount exhibitions on topics of current interest, the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève looks at football through an anthropological lens. Some consider the game as simply another opium for the people, others view it as a potent tool of civiliza-tion. The exhibition offside looks on this sport-show above all as an activity whose analysis prompts us to question the complexity of the world in which we live.