THE CUP IS OURS!, a work created by artist and curator Froiid for MAM Rio, brings together a thousand replicas of the Jules Rimet Cup, a trophy designed by sculptor Abel Lafleur in 1930, that every four years changed hands to the team that won the World Cup.
The cup circulated among various countries until it finally remained in Brazil when the country became three-time champion in 1970. There it acquired new meanings that surpassed the sporting context: the trophy functioned as a propaganda tool during the military dictatorship, which attached the image of social and economic progress to the success of the national team. The cup’s trajectory reached a turning point in 1983, exactly during the political opening of the country, when it was stolen from the CBF headquarters in Rio de Janeiro and disappeared for good. With this installation, the artist brings the cup’s story to the present, gathering a crowd of cups from which one is subtracted. In this way, he updates tensions and disputes in relation to its meaning, showing the popular appropriations of the symbol.
With THE CUP IS OURS!, Froiid dislocates the cup and its history from its original context through an aesthetic and critical operation. The artist’s references include the Situationist avant-gardes, who brought together art, play and everyday life, and Froiid mixes this with his personal experiences and forms of urban socializing: barbecuing on the roof, playing amateur football or billiards, among others. In doing so, he dribbles past the Brazilian art canon and reinscribes popular culture under a different symbolic key.
In his works, Froiid produces a kind of artistic ‘metaverse’, a symbolic field in which memory, fiction, personal experience and collective repertoires coexist and are constantly rearranged. His practice combines his deep knowledge of the history of art with experiences rooted in daily life and urban social interactions, especially from a black and male perspective, demonstrating an understanding of Brazilian culture as an ongoing system of collective creation.