Froiid
The Jules Rimet Cup was always at my house. It inhabited my childhood, perched atop a red kitchen cupboard, one of those that were ubiquitous in Brazilian homes in the 1980s and ‘90s. It sat high up, in an unreachable place, in the form of an image printed on a plastic cup. My mother decreed a clear rule: no one could touch or use that object. For a long time I had no idea of the historical weight of that suspended image. Looking back now, I think she left it on that improvised altar simply because of its bright colours, typical of advertisements, fearing that daily use would cause the design to fade, blur and come apart in the sink. What was kept there, after all, was just a plastic cup.
Even before physically vanishing from this world, the image of that cup had already multiplied on a popular scale. It was conceived in 1930 by sculptor Abel Lafleur based on the figure of Nike, the winged goddess of victory from Greek mythology, but it ended up becoming a keychain, pendant, T-shirt print, and the cup in my childhood kitchen. In Brazil, this mass reproduction was not limited to merchandise sales; it structured collective memory. What was worshipped in everyday life was not a unique and original object, the gold-plated silver sculpture on a lapis-lazuli base, but its repeated and widespread copy, as a kind of pop icon.
Later, during the 1994 World Cup, when I was about eight years old, the silhouette of the goddess Nike reappeared in TV commercials and in retrospective videos. That was the year we bought our first colour TV. I saw that image on the screen, its original golden glow, even though that shining trophy was no longer the same one that players competed for on the field. Around that same time I started to notice, still with the innocence of youth, how my neighbourhood was shaped between football and politics. It was election year. The colourful streets and walls painted green and yellow shared the same roughcast walls with the hand-painted slogans of state deputy candidates. Everything coexisted in the same paint, almost naturally.
When I reached adolescence, football lost its meaning for me. On silent days when the Brazilian national team was playing, I enjoyed walking the completely deserted streets with my punk friends. It was a strange vibe, a desolate emptiness that only occurred every four years. I could leave work early, and while families gathered inside around the TV and the collectible memorabilia of the time, we occupied the empty asphalt. To us, the World Cup functioned as a suspension of time, an interval in which the city seemed to belong to us for the duration of 90 minutes.
Only later on, researching, I came to understand the political gravity that supported that collective memory. The definitive three-time championship win in 1970 was widely appropriated by the military dictatorship as a propaganda tool. Amid the repression, the regime projected an image of national unity anchored in the success of the national team, even instrumentalising the presence of black players, central to the identity of that team, as evidence of a supposed Brazilian racial harmony.
Decades later, statements given by some of the champions from that time revealed the tensions surrounding this narrative. Although the majority of the players reasserted their distance from institutional politics, the team came to occupy an ambiguous place in the public imagination, frequently associated with the symbolic use of their victory by the military government. Their sporting triumph thus remained fraught with disputes over its historical significance.
The trajectory of this artifact reached a turning point in 1983, exactly three years before I was born, when the trophy was stolen from the CBF headquarters and presumably melted down. This material dissolution, occurring precisely during the period of political opening, functions as a symbol for me: the unmaking of its physical form mirrors the weakening of the totalitarian regime that weaponised it. This national iconography cracked again during the June 2013 protests, when my generation took to the streets to declare “there will be no Cup”, turning public space and the national team uniform itself into arenas for a political dispute, just as in other moments of recent Brazilian history.
This aesthetic and political battle directly shaped my artistic practice in the following year. In 2014, when the World Cup returned to Brazil, I developed a collective work that questioned the contradictions of that mega-event in the country’s history1. That action already investigated how football operates as a catalyst for urban economic and social traumas, and how its symbols continue to be traversed by power struggles that shape our public landscape.
Nowadays, when I think of Mario Pedrosa’s diagnosis of Brazil as a country condemned to modernity, I see the Jules Rimet Cup as the exact symbol of this process. It is a myth that has survived through the remnants of its popular industrial production. There is a bitter irony in the fact that a trophy that was celebrated by the slogan “The cup is ours!” in 1970, disappeared for good in 1983, supposedly melted down by an Argentinian2.
If 1970s advertising and military marching songs of the time used numbers in the thousands to inflate an abstract sense of pride, introducing this to the tridimensionality of physical space changes the rules of the game. The spatial device I conceived for the installation now presented at MAM Rio, titled THE CUP IS OURS!, materialises this logic through a thousand cups made of plaster, a material historically associated with devotional images and serial reproduction.
My mother was a devout worshipper of Our Lady of Aparecida. At the highest point in our home she also placed an effigy of the saint, establishing a silent (unintentional) correspondence with the plastic cup on top of the cupboard. The plaster that gives form to the sculptures in the installation evokes this same atmosphere of faith and repetition. The number thousand operates as a measurement of saturation and collective presence. By occupying the space in an arrangement reminiscent of the audience in an arena, the pieces establish an inversion: they are not only observed, but they also observe the visitors. The gold that covers the surface doesn’t attempt to reinstate the lost original; it simply reflects and disperses the light, activating the space as an unstable field. Multiplied to the limit, the goddess of victory no longer celebrates a specific triumph, but instead reveals the mechanism that transforms objects into myths, myths into images, and images into repeated matter.
- This group action, carried out by the MAPA:/ collective and titled Copa do Mundo 2014 (World Cup 2014), was based on the three-sided football match created by Danish Situationist Asger Jorn.
↩︎ - Juan Carlos Hernández (or Hernandes, according to some sources) was an Argentinian goldsmith and precious metals dealer based in Brazil. During the investigation into the theft of the Jules Rimet Cup in 1983, he was named as the trophy’s receiver and suspected of having melted it down to sell the metal.
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