Artist: AES+F (Russia), Isa Genzken (Germany), Maider López, (Spain) and Ayşe Erkmen (Turkey)
Date: 2010
Location: Ottoland, The Netherlands, façade of Witte de With Museum Center for Contemporary Art
Media/Type: Site-specific
Commissioned by: SKOR and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art
Recommender: Fulya Erdemci
"Polder Cup” focuses on the intriguingly humorous or the extraordinary behind the obvious and ordinary. López creates various events and situations for individuals to gather through a common language, in this case, football. Through play, sports and social exchange, she brings a diverse array of social groups together.
Unlike with a typical football game, López's displaced football field intersected by canals, challenges the rules of football and encourages players to seek and invent new strategies.
Not only does the location create an unusual situation, it reflects on the long-term communal fight which Dutch society has waged against water. With this project, López hopes to transform the function of the polders (the low-lying areas surrounded by dikes), going beyond their historical and agricultural uses, to host a public event held within the framework of a common sporting match. Through the participation of football players and participants from all walks of life, the polder will undergo a transformation in which its uses can be opened up for new interpretations, challenging the way in which we inherently perceive our spatial surroundings.
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