Dariusz Czaja, Tomasz Szerszeń The Ball as the World
Zbigniew Benedyktowicz “The World is Not a Football…”?!
The
Anthropology of Football The text envisaged as a sui generis
introduction to this issue begins with a phrase from Antoni
Słonimski’s poem: Kontrmarsz, written in 1923 in response to
Vladimir Mayakovski’s Left march! (1919) and in contrast to the
incorrect perception of football as a synonym of primitiveness,
indicating the intellectual dimension of the game and its force as a
cultural phenomenon deserving the closer attention of the
anthropologist of culture. In reference to texts amassed in the
issue (by such authors as Stomma, Bredekamp, Czaja, Szerszeń et al.)
and the complex image of football encountered in Heinrich Böll’s The
Clown emphasis has been placed on its almost religious
(quasi-religious) character, demonstrating the startling conquest of
the world by football as well as the presence of “thinking in
football categories” in contemporary language, politics and culture.
Present-day football is not only the Great World. It is Galactic and
Global, a supra-national and international oecumenic community, a
world with a language of its own. While characterising football –
that ”beutiful game” – as “volatile thought” the author described it
as a “dynamic community of thought and comprehension”. In a
discussion of the documentaries: Pelada (USA, 2011), Blind
Ambition (UK, 2010) and My Mate Manchester United
(Bulgaria, 2011) shown as part of a film review accompanying the
festival of football culture in Warsaw at the time of the latest
European Football Championship (Euro 2012) the author justified
football as a Space of the Imagination, Freedom, Dialogue and
Meeting.
Horst
Bredekamp
Foot, Fortune, Ball: the Platonic Principles of the Handicap. The
Globe and Deficits of Completeness
The
text deals with the historical and mythical sources of football. The
author analysed the globe-ball-cosmos motif, concentrating on
Plato’s myth of creation and spectacles at the Florentine court of
the Medicis.
Stanisław Dygat, Gustaw Holoubek, Tadeusz Konwicki Sorry about
the Disturbances
Record of conversations held by three outstanding Polish artists at
the time of the 1974 World Cup.
Przemysław Kaniecki
“Less for medals”. Dygat, Konwicki and
Holoubek as 1974 World Cup Commentators (in “Literature”)
A
series of talks between three famous friends and artists (two
writers and an actor) was entitled We apologize for the drawbacks
and was published in an important Polish art magazine “Literature”.
The talks were extremely popular at the time – it was a very special
period for Polish football. The talks can be approached in many
ways, i.e. as a commentary on the World Cup, as a reflection on
sport and it’s transformations, as a document of intellectual
formation and a kind of a portrait of certain characters. Kaniecki
focuses on observations of these three commentators about the
so-called national character.
Stanisław Barańczak
Neeskens Will Not Spit in Our Face
Football and the Polish question – this critical feuilleton is about
the comic strip: Od Walii do Brazylii (From Wales to Brasil),
presenting the triumphs of the Polish team.
Jurij Andruchowycz Game of Chance
This
literary essay has a strong biographical foundation. The author
followed the history of football in Ukraine (to the 1990s a part of
the Soviet Union) and devoted particular attention to the Dynamo
Kiev football club. He also sketched a credible portrait of the
celebrated Ukrainian player (and coach) Valeri Lobanovsky.
Marek Bieńczyk Football as the Space of Dreams
A
record of an imaginary correspondence between the football fan and
debuting man of letters Jan Jo Rabenda and leading Polish
Czechophile publishers, concerning the mysterious and forgotten book
by Eduard Bass: Klapzuba’s Eleven.
Krzysztof Mętrak The Alchemy of the Zośka
In
this feuilleton-reminiscence Krzysztof Mętrak – film and literary
critic, passionate fan football fan – recalled zośka, a game popular
during his childhood, simultaneously executing a mini-portrait of
Warsaw immediately after the war.
Jerzy Górzański Dependent or Independent Football?;
Snow
Two
short forms (feuilleton and literary) by Jerzy Górzański: writer,
resident of Warsaw, and football expert.
Danilo Facca Pallone, Calcio and Liedholm’s Cakes
An
expansive – in reference to the author’s personal recollections –
study on the transformations of Italian football. The text shows the
enormous change of two forms: post-war Italian football (1945-1880)
and an edition whose beginnings go back to the turn of the 1970s.
The first form (pallone) was a sport strongly enrooted in plebeian
festivities and folk competition, watched “live” on the stadiums.
The second (calcio) is already a fully professional sport subjected
to the laws of business and commercialised and, most importantly,
followed to a great extent through the intermediary of television.
Did the “modernisation” of football have to take place at the cost
of annihilating Pallone culture and the desacralisation of Sunday,
robbed of the afternoon ritual in order to fill the whole weekend
and Monday with matches so that as many spectators as possible could
watch them on pay television channels?
Kasper Bajon The Sadness of Calcio
This
short essay is about Italian football and how it grew with the
culture and history of this amazing country. The author of this
issue recounts his childhood days, when he was a great fan of AC
Milan. He is summing up the beginnings of his fascination with
calcio, and trying to answer the crucial question: “What happened to
Italian football?”.
Simon Kuper Of Bunkers and Cigars: The Holocaust and the Making
of the Great Ajax
A
colourful tale about the legendary Ajax Amsterdam football club in
the 1960s and 1970s – its status was created by Holocaust survivors.
Iwona Kurz Auschwitz Matches and Games. Football in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau
Modern sport is the child of the same epoch that gave rise to
Auschwitz. Sport entered the international arena together with
nineteenth-century national renascence and the idea of the national
state. Up to this day, such events are the only peacetime occasion
for a regular and open unification of nation-states (Dunning). The
author of the Olympic idea – Baron Pierre de Coubertin – stressed
two dimensions of sports: rivalry was to become the foundation of an
international harmony of nations whose force is created by training.
In the development of modern societies, sport, thanks to imposed
discipline, was to harden the spirit and, at the same time, develop
the body of the individual, the foundation of a healthy social
organism. In turn, “concentration camp” can be understood as an
institution that focuses and radicalises, and brings to a visible
extreme the assorted dimensions of the “normal” world of modernity,
often transparent on a daily basis (Bauman, Agamben). The term
“sport” functioned in the reality of Auschwitz in a double meaning.
First, it denoted sports events held on a semi-legal basis, and
secondly – it involved tormenting the inmates by forcing them to
perform exhaustive physical exercises. The article shows the
consequences of the presence of sport in concentration camp reality,
and devotes most attention to boxing and football events, in
particular in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the football field,
described by i.a. Tadeusz Borowski, was situated right next to the
Judenrampe, where people condemned to death in the gas chambers got
off the arriving trains.
Dariusz Czaja
Game of Metaphors. Writers about Football
Why
is football such a popular sport? What does the force of its
hypnotic attraction consist of? What is decisive for its universal
range? What language best reflects the essence of football? The
author seeks answers to these questions in texts by assorted
writers, who found football exciting (and in certain cases actively
pursued it). The analytical but deeply emotional statements made by
outstanding men of letters (A. Kijowski, J. Pilch, S. Rushdie, R.
Coover, B. Hrabal) contain numerous metaphorical expressions intent
on describing football. The interpretations and assessments pertain
to football as a spectacle, a Mass, a holiday, a (existential)
sacrament and a circus.
Dariusz Kosiński An Evening in the Theatre of Dreams. Comments on
the (Non)Theatrical Nature of Football
While treating the football match and football as such as a specific
and multi-dimensional phenomenon that, at the same, time, possesses
numerous features analogous to better examined and described
cultural phenomena, the author proposes to apply select theatrical
conceits for the purpose of analysis. In doing so, he does not
intend to prove that football is a theatre but through an analysis
of those theatrical elements he hopes to capture certain traits
specific for the football spectacle. The text considers successively
an analysis of: 1) the manner of building, and the functioning of,
characters created by football players (with Leo Messi and Cristiano
Ronaldo as examples); 2) the relations between the fictitious and
real nature of the football match; 3) the sui generis “scenario” of
matches in the perspective of their foreseeability and
non-predictability. Such analyses are to prove a thesis maintaining
that the cultural and political significance of football is to a
great extent the outcome of the fact that it is probably the purest
model of fiction endowed with enormous real effectiveness, acting as
a spectacular meta-commentary on contemporary Western culture.
Mateusz Kanabrodzki Echoing Vuvuzelas
The
author returns to the World Cup organised in the capital of South
Africa in 2010. In a contribution to the psychoanalytical theory of
football, he focuses his attention on the custom of blowing plastic
trumpets (vuvuzelas) on South African stadiums; subsequently, this
practice became disseminated across the world. The text cites
assorted genological hypotheses without resolving their veracity.
One of them goes back to the Hebrew Rosh Hashanah and the instrument
played in its course – the shofar. By citing a new interpretation of
the shofar formulated by Theodor Reik, which owes much to the story
about the beginnings of culture recounted by Freud in Totem and
Taboo, the author attempts to discover the concealed traces of
psychic reality in a football match.
Zbigniew Pasek What Sort of Salvation Does Cracovia Offer?
The
article deals with the spirituality of sport, with the author
embarking upon the fulfilment of religious functions by
extra-religious domains of culture. He discusses this question upon
the example of football and the Cracovia club from Cracow. The
titular “salvation” refers to Oriental soteriological conceptions
that regard the goal of human life to be inner development and the
attainment of “higher levels” of temporal life or the realisation of
certain positive values. Sports fans can be perceived as
quasi-religious groups involved in the realisation of community and
transgression needs. According to the interpretations proposed by
certain theories of religion, these are the fundamental features of
religious life.
Piotr Jakub Fereński Pearl in the Crown
The
essay considers the possibility of connecting certain elements of
religious life and the practices, customs, and traditions associated
with football. The author analysed predominantly the example of the
Real Madrid football club and its aficionados.
Ludwik Stomma 1:0, or People Like Gods
Of
the many ways of explaining the popularity of sport, the author
proposes the ethnological interpretation which reaches to the
mythological sources of the phenomenon. It is obvious that sport is
a classification, a division into “we” and “they”. This
classification, however, is not created by laws which function on a
daily basis. Western sport teams are usually multi-national, while
Polish ones, although a foreigner or two can appear, seem to be much
more uniform – but how many true Warsaw residents play in the Legia
team? The greatest importance is ascribed to the national colours
which decide who is “ours” and who is not. Sport is ruled by laws
analoguous to those of a carnival and football is the queen of all
sport; it is here that a radical reversal takes place: hands, used
everyday (cf. the number of idiomatic expressions connected with
them) are replaced by feet. A football match is a reversal of the
Promethean feat. The collective effort of the team creates a
situation advantageous for one its members, who, with his legs, must
conquer the only “normal” person – the goal-keeper, who relies on
his hands, while the loot (the ball) is left on alien territory, the
“other world”. The player who shoots a goal is, therefore, a
anti-Prometheus, who returns fire to the gods. We are dealing here
with a reconstruction of chaos (on a social scale, much smaller than
the cosmic one) in order to repeat once again the act of creation.
Roberto DaMatta Futebol. Notes
In
an environment as highly hierarchized as Brazilian society, space
created by football opens up the possibility of unhampered and
individualised expression; here, everyone can demonstrate his
talents and weaknesses. Victory won thanks to aptness and own
achievements is a “miracle” of sorts that has no chances of being
repeated in ossified Brazilian society. It can appear only in a
space open to individual expression: the widely comprehended space
of the “game” in futebol but also the samba, the carnival, the
umbanda, and art, where individuality rules. Futebol also expresses
the tension between destiny, i.e. a collective and impersonal force,
and individual desire that aims at breaking the social chain of
poverty and at liberation from the feeling of defeat. The game of
futebol – or rather: futebol as a game – remains thus in the very
centre of powerful folk dramaturgy.
Maciej Rożalski Torcidas
The
text describes one of the matches played by local teams at the
Pituaçu stadium in the Brazilian town of Salvador. By applying the
reportage technique the author shows the world of Brazilian football
and groups of fans, at the same time analysing the phenomenon of the
latter’s organisation into associations. Brazilian football fans
create so-called torcidas organisadas, which at first glance
are similar to many such groups the world over. In reality, however,
they are extremely well organised and ruled by certain codes and
aesthetic; their stadium applause assumes the form of performance
confrontations in which the winners are torcidas capable of
showing the most attractive spectacle.
Magdalena Barbaruk Football as a Cultural Machine?
Narrations about Argentinian Identity
The
point of departure for the presented reflections on the significance
of football for the formation of Argentinian national identity is
the book by Pablo Alabarces: Fútbol y Patria. El fútbol y las
narrativas de la nación en la Argentina, an attempt at
scientific examination with the assistance of categories borrowed
from studies on culture, sociology and anthropology. The author
argues that in certain countries football can be a crucial
phenomenon enabling the examination of culture; more, today it
appears to be a phenomenon that allows a description of global
post-national television culture. The author claims that Alabarces’
book is not a work about football but a pioneering publication on
cultural studies, for which football comprises “only” the object of
cognition.
Magda Szcześniak Rainbow Scarves, or In Four Years It Will Be Too
Late
With
an outline of the atmosphere of homophobia prevailing on European
football stadiums as her point of departure, the author considers
identity policies accessible to gay players and fans of
non-normative sexual identities. A radical form of resistance
against stadium homophobia was, i.a. an initiative (apparently
fictitious) of Polish gay football fans, which they called Rainbow
Stands. Members of this venture, created in reality by Paweł
Demirski and Monika Strzępka as well as actors of the Polski Theatre
in Wrocław supporting them, demanded space separated from other
fans, i.e. the construction of special stands for fans identifying
themselves with the LGBTQ movement. The author analysed this
tactical proposal, developed by Demirski and Strzępka in the
spectacle Tęczowa Trybuna 2012 (Rainbow Stand 2012), in the
light of the anti-social queer theory represented by Lee Edelman.
Zbigniew Majchrowski Football as Introduction to Gender Studies
The
football team is a representation of the “masculine gender”. A
characteristic element of contemporary football teams is their
heterogeneity – in this case the “masculinity” is the common
element. But this base is becoming unstable – if we take into
consideration such issues as: the presence of woman's look on
football, the meaning the image of football players joying after
scoring a goal (if we displace it from the football context), or the
presently occurring redefining of masculinity – along with the
phenomenon of metrosexuality and the sexualisation and fetishisation
of football players’ bodies.
Jo Harper No More Heroes. Why Class Matters in the Demise of
English Football
The
essay takes an anecdotal journey into a boy’s experience of growing
up in a polarising and revolting London in the 1970s, with the
football terraces a public arena in which these changes were both
reflected and driven. A personal lament as to why England is so bad
at the game they invented.
Karolina Kosińska What About a Match? Football According to Ken
Loach
Ken
Loach remains one of the most engagé directors whose films focus
predominantly on contemporary British social issues; he is a
declared socialist who consistently and decidedly supports those who
had been relegated to the margin of society. At the same time, Loach
is a passionate football fan – not by accident does he introduce
into his films assorted football motifs. Football appears, however,
not to be so much a form of entertainment or an exciting sport as an
instrument of political struggle. Its importance lies in the fact
that it builds a feeling of community. Loach tries to restore the
original ethos of football and return it to the working class, which
had been to a certain extent deprived of it due to the extreme
commercialisation of the football business. The presented text
recalls the director’s films in which football is markedly present
and tries to decipher the sui generis political manifesto, which
Loach inscribed into this sport.
Amelia Serraller Calvo Spanish Reality from the Viewpoint of
Football
The
text discusses the multi-strata connections between Spanish football
and the economic crisis, politics and history of the country.
Janusz Drzewucki Globalisation, Football and Something More
A
presentation of Franklin Foer’s book: How Soccer Explains the
World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.
Tomasz Szerszeń Zidane’s Melancholies
One
of the personages of sports, which has shone the brightest in the
field of art, is the French football player Zinedine Zidane. This
text presents two works, devoted to this player: the film Zidane:
A 21st Century Portrait and the book La Mélancolie de Zidane.
These two works present a “different” insight into football – close
to the Freudian term “uncanny”. This term allows to look at football
from the perspective of that, which is strange, disturbing, and even
alien and impossible – what transcends the order of the match and
knocks the spectator out of his routine. The culmination of this
article is a look from that point of view, at the shocking blow
delivered by Zidane during the World Cup finals in 2006.
Marc Artigau Football Fiction
Mini-stories by the Catalonian playwright, read during “The Midnight
Club” programme broadcast by Radio Catalunya.
Mateusz Kanabrodzki Fragments of a Love Discourse about Football.
The Beginning
This
confession of love for football is modelled on A Lover’s
Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes. The text was inspired by
a wish to write about football in the same way in which the game is
played. The point is not to write instead of playing, thus
compensating “non-playing” but to play a game of writing. Listening
closely to theoreticians of the discourse and discoursiveness who
discover the body within the discourse, the author, upon the example
of football, which he included into the active arts de faire
distinguished by Michel de Certeau, tried to demonstrate the
foundations of discoursiveness in football.
“A Frenzied Cry Can Be Heard at This Moment”.
Wembley as a Text
One
of the most famous matches played by the Polish national team took
place 35 years ago – on 17 October 1973. The tie with Great Britain
at Wembley Stadium guaranteed Poland participation in the World Cup
finals in West Germany (1974) and a third place. This legendary
match has been treated as a text, and we publish – word by word –
the commentary by Jan Ciszewski accompanying the television
broadcast.
Łukasz Sochacki “Battle of England.” Wembley in the Press
A
survey and an analysis of reactions in the Polish press after the
“victorious tie” of the Polish football team at Wembley in 1973 in a
match with the England favourites. Without doubt this particular
meeting remains a myth, whose force fans appreciate up to this day…
Katarzyna Skowronek The Anatomical Atlas of a Player. Textual
Images of the Male Body and Male Immaturity
The
article concentrates on ways the body of a football player is
described in the Internet sport information section of two Polish
tabloids: “Super Express” and “Fakt”. Portraying the body of the
footballers, their emotions and behaviour, the author does not
present actual players but characters who to a great extent are the
products of the media. The outcome is an incomplete anatomical atlas
of the footballer’s body, reconstructed upon the basis of a certain
set of texts.
Barbara Magierowa, Antoni Kroh The Ball is Round or Square, or on
Polish Football Vocabulary
Fragments of Prywatny leksykon współczesnej polszczyzny (The
Private Lexicon of Contemporary Polish), on which the authors
have been working already for several decades. This time, the
entries refer to football, with the oldest dating back to the 1950s.
Tomasz Szerszeń
Diego Maradona: Holy History
Diego Armando Maradona: no other football player had reached such a
quasi-divine status as the one enjoyed today by this Argentinian
player. No other has a “church” composed of more than 10 000
faithful followers. No player’s biography contains such drama or
ambivalence. In none does football merge so closely with poetics and
religion. Finally, no player has believed to such a degree in his
divine calling, or that he is a incarnation of divinity whose site
of revelation is the playing field. Interestingly, all biographies –
books, films – apply a quasi-religious vocabulary to describe
Maradona. At the same time, his life really does echo a model
ascribed to certain saints or mythical figures. In no case is this,
however, simple or exemplary “saintliness” but rather the model of a
“holy sinner” or a holy fool at odds with the world…
Dariusz Czaja The Lion and the Flea. The Magician from Rosario
A
“Time” cover (February 2012) shows an almost life-size face of Leo
Messi. The title of the lead article says in bold majuscule: KING
LEO. Under it – a lead from Bobby Ghosh’s article: “Lionel Messi is
the best player in the world and perhaps the best of all times”. The
author tries to check the foundation of this hypothesis, seeking
arguments in football statistics, opinions of assorted players,
trainers and commentators. Finally, he stresses not only Messi’s
excellent craftsmanship but compares his playing to art. In a
justification of the thesis about the artistry and brilliance of the
player from Rosario, he discovers parallels between the essential
components of the mythical biographies of Messi and Mozart
(wunderkind, slight built, the role of the father in the development
of his talent, the puer aeternus syndrome). As Pep Guardiola
declared: “The phenomenon of Messi cannot be explained and can be
only admired”.
Kasper Bajon To Describe Totti
Words are helpless when describing Totti. Historical analogies?
Perhaps Robert Guiscard, Frederic Hohenstauff, Francesco Sforza,
Gattamelata, possibly Cesare Borgia. In this manner Francesco “Il
Capitano” Totti becomes part of a long list of heroic rascals from
the Apennine Peninsula – cursed emperors, self-proclaimed princes,
unruly condottieri. There is no, and probably has never been, player
more immersed in world history. The captain of Roma is not a symbol
of our times, and says nothing about our contemporaneity. Totti is
not part of the present but resembles a hero from another distant
epoch – a recollection of the might of the Italy of yore...
Zbigniew Masternak Always Offside
A
self-portrait of the writer as a player. In this case, this is not a
metaphor but a fact: Zbigniew Masternak is not only the author of
books and scenarios but also a football player in regional league
clubs and captain of the football team of Polish writers.
Marek Bieńczyk The Face of Beenhakker
This
sketch attempts a rendition of an existential portrait of the former
coach of the Polish national team – Leo Beenhakker. Taking a close
look at his face and subjecting its features to a profound analysis,
the author transcends the range of an ordinary description and turns
the examined countenance into an allegory of valour, manhood and
invincibility, refined with the passage of years.
Horst Bredekamp Fertile Moment
An
analysis maintained in the Warburg spirit: depictions of football
and war share certain features, namely, they present people at a
time of almost unsurpassable physical and psychic excitement. The
tangle of opponents, who in synchronic tension give vent to their
energy, conceals a certain affiliation of forms, to which the
activity of memory refers also on the football field. Images of
matches constitute an archive of this extreme experience.
Łukasz Zaremba Flat Images of a Profound Game
The
text is built around contemporary art works dealing with football
and discusses select manners of viewing a match. In a reference to
performance by Massimo Furlan entitled: Boniek! and a
multi-media installation by Harun Farocki: Deep Play, the
author does not contrast them as two basically separate types of
experience – direct and via the media. The text attempts to show
that both modes of reception incessantly mingle in practical
observations of a sports spectacle. That which is mediated does not
have to signify the absence of authenticity, experience or truth.
Discussing the work by Harun Farocki the author refers to current
debates concerning the inside of the world of football (supervision
over the spectators, replays for the judges) but also poses a
question about the information that can be absorbed. The Farocki’s
installation – 12 monitors showing the finale of the 2006 World Cup
from different perspectives – has been presented as a meta-image
commenting on the conditions of the origin of contemporary works.
Marcin Drabek The Visuality of Football
Football is one of those sports, which despite their liminal
character have permeated the deepest into the sphere of daily life,
creating their own orders of norms and values, separate
institutions, characteristic policies of marking, communication,
creation and perception, ethic and an aesthetic. This article
focuses on the way in which football regulates the visual qualifies
of assorted domains of popular culture – from television
intermediary in the football spectacle to contemporary market
processes and the performative dimension in which the spectators
become active actors.
Przemysław Strożek Beyond the Match. The Problems of Football in
Polish Contemporary Art
A
discussion on the presence of the football motif in Polish
contemporary art. This sui generis survey emphasizes works by
Zbigniew Warpechowski, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Zbigniew Libera, Marcin
Maciejowski, Robert Rumas, Kamil Kuskowski, Edward Dwurnik and
Tomasz Kulka.
Tomasz Plata Adam Adach. Representation
A
text accompanying an exhibition of works by Adam Adach:
Representation, held at the BWA Warszawa Gallery, a critical
commentary on historical narrations and nationalistic hysteria
accompanying Polish football.
Tadeusz Lubelski Football in Polish Fiction Film
In
spite of the enormous popularity of football in Poland, very few
feature films about it have been made in our country. The author’s
objects of interest are the ten films, whose topic is football.
Eight of them are full length feature films: Bitwa o Kozi Dwór
(Battle of the Goat’s Manor) by Wadim Berestowski (1961),
Święta wojna (The Holy War) by Julia Dziedzina (1965),
Paragon gola (Shoot Paragon!) by Stanisław Jędryka (1969),
Gra o wszystko (Playing for Everything) by Andrzej Kotkowski
(1978), Piłkarski poker (Soccer Poker) by Janusz Zaorski
(1988), Pięć minut przed gwizdkiem (Five Minutes Before the
Whistle) by Mirosław Gronowski (1988), Boisko bezdomnych (The
Offsiders) by Kasia Adamik (2008) i Skrzydlate świnie (Winged
Pigs) by Anna Kazejak (2010); the remaining is the football
novel form the film Zawsze w niedzielę (Always on Sundays) by
Ryszard Ber (1965) and the medium length television film Nóż w
głowie Dino Baggio (The Knife in Dino Baggio’s Head) by Marek
Piwowski (1999). According to the thematic rule identified in the
analysed films, the author divides the analytical part of his work
in two segments. In the first he discusses the mythical epoch of
fair play, when football was not profit orientated: for pleasure,
but also to develop social virtues. The iconic emblem of this epoch
is the fictional scene of breaking the crossbar in the Russian
team’s goalpost in Piłkarski poker by Zaorski. The second
segment is dedicated to the contemporary state of football,
dominated by corruption and frauds. The epilogue consists of the
discussion of the film Skrzydlate świnie, which goes without
football; the centre of the plot are the football fans.
Michał Okoński Sleep Training
Is
football an exact science? Can one programme success? Is it possible
to conduct sleep training? The author takes a subjective journey
around the edges of the world of football and the questions that we
usually do not pose while watching a match.
Justyna Chmielewska Eurotic Warsaw
A
subjective photo-essay from the streets of Warsaw at the time of the
Euro 2012 matches. A presentation of the town as seen by a person
uninvolved in following the football events.
Przemysław J. Olszewski Ethno 2012. Report from a Football
Culture Festival
*** Writers and Football Players. Stadium
Excerpts
Michał Zaranek Story of Hatred
A
short story about the perennial rivalry between two famous Spanish
clubs: Real Madrid and FC Barcelona – the historical and political
contexts.
Rafał Stec FC Independent – Will Spain Split into Two?
The
economic crisis might act as a spark, that could go out tomorrow or
the day after, for setting the Catalonian separatist movement
ablaze, but the football impact of the symbol of Catalonia or
Barcelona, the tribal emotions surrounding it, and the uninterrupted
sequence of matches can provide fuel for long. More, the crisis will
pass or diminish but not the wish for independence…
Krzysztof Lipka The Audible Landscape: The Town and the Call
This
article is a continuation of the Audible Landscape series published
in "Konteksty."
The History of a Single Painting: Władysław Wankie, Oyster
Fisherwomen
Piotr Borowski Foreigners. The Netherlands / Poland
Joanna Wolfram On
a Canvas by Władysław Wankie
Agnieszka Rosales
Rodriguez Oyster Fisherwomen by Władysław Wankie
Wojciech Marchlewski The Dutch in Poland |