Once Upon a Field 

Once Upon a Field  is built around a play on words that, much like this World Cup itself, moves across languages and territories. Once means “eleven” in Spanish —the eleven players on the pitch— while also evoking the beginning of a story: once upon a time. The exhibition brings together eleven storytellers, eleven artists —and one film director as coach— who bring to Mexico narratives shaped by imagination and play, but also by politics, memory, migration, and war.

Because football has never been merely a sport. Before the stadiums, there is the impulse to play, one that begins in childhood: in the street, in schoolyards, or on improvised fields where any object can become a ball and any space can become a pitch. Even when the ball disappears, the game endures.

This is what Abderrahmane Sissako reveals in Timbuktu: a group of young men and children play an imaginary football match while the game itself has been forbidden. The ball is absent, yet the bodies continue running. In many ways, Sissako becomes the spiritual coach of the exhibition, and the invisible ball of Timbuktu travels from story to story throughout the show.

The exhibition also includes a selection of works by acclaimed photographer Peter Robinson, whose gaze explored for more than six decades both the grand spectacle of world football and the quiet poetry found at its margins. From Diego Maradona celebrating in Mexico after the “Hand of God” goal during the 1986 World Cup, to images of an amateur match played in Chapultepec Park in 1985, Robinson’s photographs reveal how football exists simultaneously as global legend and everyday experience.

Through painting, photography, installation, and film, Once Upon a Field approaches football through the emotion of celebrating a goal: as a site where shared fictions are created, where bodies passionately rehearse other ways of moving, where world history is reflected and contested, and where the game ultimately remains possible even when the ball disappears.

Artists: Abbdeslem Ayed, Amoako Boafo, Slimen Elkamel, Clotílde Jiménez, Youssef Nabil, Abderrahmane Sissako, Raphaél Barontini, Omar Victor Diop, Salah Elmur, Ian Micheal, Peter Robinson and Peter Uka.

—Mariane Ibrahim