Behind the Surface

Behind the Surface is a performance exploring the entangled relationship between the historical roots of Italian football and the designer's personal experience as a player. The work presents a backstage live-stream to render a new reading of the traditions at play in the sport, aerating the political motives by employing storytelling, objects and gestures. Shifting the gaze from the game itself shows how the activity performs as a homogenising stage, reinforcing masculine stereotypes and dominant archaic ideologies. Through autoethnographic research, Gianmarco Ciucciovè confronts how, because it's staged on propagandistic foundations, football strongly impacts the identity of a heteronormative man growing up in a small Italian town.