Marianna Simnett. WINNER

About

On the occasion of the 2024 European Football Championship taking place in Germany, artist Marianna Simnett is producing the multi-channel film installation “WINNER”, conceived as a dance for film in three acts, which is told from the perspective of football.

“WINNER” takes up the dramaturgy of the game and dissects its socially constructed power hierarchies, mass psychology and the constant pressure to perform. Through the element of dance, football's most passionate moments are re-staged and radically transformed: soaring and triumph, brutality and wildness, suffering and defeat.

The film is set on a football field and is an adaptation of Graham Greene's 1954 short story The Destructors . An extraordinary group of dancers mutate between hooligans and football players. The focus of the plot is the group's destruction of a magical-realistic house of cards. The house belongs to a former referee, whose decisions determine whether the game wins or loses. A choir of Baby Ultra fans, vocally interpreted by American singer and performer Lydia Lunch, monitors the proceedings and sounds down from the stands.

Simnett's vivid, hallucinatory world extends beyond the screen into the exhibition space, subverting the architecture of football and moving it into the museum. When entering a long tunnel that football players go through before the start of the game, which is also reminiscent of a birth canal, viewers are confronted with a choreography of images that moves through the room and is repeatedly interrupted by melancholic songs about winning.