I must begin by saying that, for much of my life, football was not exactly a passion. At the age of five, I became a São Paulo FC supporter somewhat by force of circumstance: I grew up surrounded by uncles who insisted on raising the club’s flag at every end-of-year family celebration. One day, one of them appeared with a selection of football shirts and asked me to pick one—thus was my “football identity” defined from then on. For some aesthetic reason (or perhaps due to an unconscious concrete impulse, typical of someone raised among São Paulo’s railings and a palette of red, black, and white), I chose São Paulo. Over the years, I became involved with other sports—volleyball, handball—and football always remained peripheral. Until, around the age of 14 or 15, I understood that, in Brazil, talking about football is never just about sport.
I remember clearly the impact of studying the military dictatorship and beginning to grasp the links between football, politics, and the construction of collective memory in Brazil. It was then that I started taking an interest in the history of organized supporter groups—their forms of resistance, their confrontations with state apparatuses, and the ways in which they occupied stadiums as sites of language. Gradually, I also began engaging with another kind of game: one played in the archives. I discovered that institutions like the Football Museum in São Paulo had been working on a museology committed to community voices and narratives that fall outside of the dominant canon. Unintentionally, I became more and more involved: I didn’t become an athlete, but I began to play casually—even participating in the Museums Cup last year, where my women’s team took the silver medal. It’s almost ironic that I’m now writing this text. But perhaps not surprising: after all, it was never just about football—and that’s precisely why it continues to move us.
I first encountered Froiid’s work during an edition of Videobrasil in São Paulo. Since then, I have followed the ways in which the artist mobilizes elements of Brazilian popular culture to challenge established historical narratives. Despite their apparent humor and lightness, his works perform a gesture of critical revision: they reclaim images, utterances, and objects from the collective imagination and reconfigure them through new lenses. We might say that Froiid does not aim merely to represent collective memories, but to re-enact the ways in which those memories were constructed, contested, or silenced—thus producing counter-narratives that elude hegemonic forms of documentation.
From a theoretical standpoint, we might say that the artist’s approach resonates with broader discussions about the uses of the archive in contemporary art. On this subject, I’m particularly fond of an interview from the early 2000s in which Hal Foster, an influential art and visual culture critic, quotes architect Rem Koolhaas: “There is not enough past to go around.” Foster’s provocation highlights the dilemma of a time saturated by both ruins and absences, where the artistic gesture increasingly turns to the past—not out of nostalgia, but from a pressing need to rebuild connections, trace erasures, and imagine critical possibilities from what has been excluded. For Foster, the so-called “archival impulse” does not seek to restore wholes, but to propose relational networks that defy neoliberal erasures of history. This impulse manifests in practices that, instead of merely documenting, fabricate: they do not arrange the past in straight lines but entangle it with the present and what is yet to come. As Foster shows, it is about producing counter-archives that question the promise of the document’s neutrality and stage new forms of knowledge and belonging.
This reading also finds resonance in the propositions of philosopher Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Her ideas are rooted in a critique of coloniality and the understanding that archives encapsulate and perpetuate practices of power and domination. For Azoulay, we have the responsibility to construct what she calls a “potential history”—a refusal of the relentless pursuit of novelty and a commitment to revealing worlds historically shattered by structures of domination. It means taking the past seriously, not as a relic to be locked in an archive, displayed behind museum glass, or dissected by specialists in a library, but rather as a political proposal for how we might live together.
From her perspective, engaging critically with archives also means confronting the silences they carry—a reckoning with dominant narratives by reassessing what has been recorded, forgotten, or suppressed. This process requires what Azoulay calls “unlearning the archive”: destabilizing the categories that structure it, recognizing the practices that uphold power relations, and creating space for alternative forms of listening and inscription. Unlearning the archive is essential to joining with those who have resisted it and reclaiming what she terms the worldliness of objects—that is, recontextualizing them and acknowledging their origins and meanings. She further emphasizes that archival artists who work with fragments and testimonies can offer a critical and alternative view of history, stripped of its traditional “aura.” For her, art holds great potential to challenge the boundaries and inscriptions of power within the archival field.
Froiid’s works may be read in light of these ideas, as exercises in critical reactivation that turn the past into a terrain of political fiction. In his solo exhibition Abaixa o Braço, the artist mobilizes layers of Brazilian collective memory—across sport, war, graphic design, pedagogy, and spectacle—to reorganize signs, affects, and choreographies of the social body. Rather than simply denouncing erasures, his works function as counter-archives: they strain the boundaries between document and imagination, testimony and invention. Froiid does not seek to restore a faithful version of history; instead, he bends it, fabricates with its residues, blending artificial intelligence with popular sayings and visual archetypes with flashes of memory. In this operation, art and politics cease to be separate fields and become simultaneous strategies for reshaping perception and disputing memory.
The exhibition title, Abaixa o Braço ("Lower Your Arm"), is borrowed from a song composed by Ataulfo Alves in the 1940s, in the context of World War II. With a satirical and critical tone, the song mocks the authoritarian pretensions of the Axis Powers while celebrating the democratic alliance of the Americas. Through wordplay and samba, the lyrics summon political and geopolitical imagery, proposing a popular and disobedient response to the logic of war. By evoking this repertoire, Froiid constructs a bridge between humor, critique, and resistance.
In today’s context—marked by the resurgence of authoritarianism and the rearticulation of fascist discourses—the gesture of “lowering one’s arm” ceases to be merely a sign of surrender and becomes an act of active refusal, a call to memory as a form of resistance. The exhibition weaves together these meanings to explore how war, sport, and spectacle function as symbolic battlegrounds, in which the body is continuously shaped, mobilized, and represented—and in which art can still operate as detour, disruption, and reinvention.
Among the works in the exhibition, the series E AGORA stands out. Composed of red-and-white canvases, the series activates a tactical visuality situated between military and sporting fields. The geometric forms—tilted, overlapping, rhythmic rectangles—evoke both signage panels and game cloths. The series directly dialogues with Carlos Scliar’s 1978 painting E Agora. Scliar, a prominent modernist artist, served as a pracinha—a Brazilian Expeditionary Force soldier in World War II—and was also the author of wartime notebooks. In the original canvas, the partially obscured text beneath a lamp suggests that only part of history can be illuminated. Froiid revisits this reference not through the lamp itself, which is absent from his works, but through the background’s vibration, as though the surfaces move and cast zones of shadow and revelation. This tension between figure and abstraction, form and meaning, traverses two major traditions of Brazilian art: concretism and new figuration. His works’ geometric structure alludes to the constructive legacy but is subverted by textual elements and dislocated planes, which destabilize compositional order and open space for a convulsive visuality marked by noise, failure, and instability.
These paintings also reactivate a silenced memory of Brazil’s involvement in World War II. By mobilizing the figure of the pracinhas, Brazilian soldiers sent to fight in Italy, Froiid summons a narrative often absent from collective memory. Who were these men? What stories were told—and forgotten—about their actions? Generally, the notion persists that Brazil is a country uninvolved in wars—a myth that obscures the contradictions and violence of its participation in both external and internal conflicts. By evoking this historical chapter, E AGORA places the viewer in a field of tension between remembrance and erasure, between the solemnity of heroism and the precariousness of national memory.
In Bola Dente de Leite, Froiid condenses into a single image the tension between childhood, authoritarianism, and collective memory. The large-format painting features the classic vinyl ball—an icon of Brazilian children's play in the 1980s and 1990s—accompanied by a stylized child figure, joyfully running in cleats and a sports uniform... wearing a military helmet. The scene is constructed with flat colors, clean lines, and bold typography, clearly referencing the graphic language of toy packaging and advertising from that era. Yet what we see is an impossible ad, in which play and war coexist on the same surface. The helmet, a highlighted element, transforms the game into symbolic training—preparation for obedience, control, and the performance of premature masculinity.
In the photographic series O Peixe pela Boca, Froiid presents six portraits of athletic men kissing trophies and football jerseys with performative gestures. Although the objects allude to the sports universe, it’s impossible to identify which clubs or competitions they belong to—there is only a generic formal echo of standardized victories. The images are generated by artificial intelligence: faces, muscles, and movements are composed of algorithms trained to simulate an idealized body with no recognizable origin. The kiss—repeated with minimal variation—ceases to be an expression of emotion and becomes instead an emblem of a collective visual narrative: one of celebrated masculinity, sporting glory, and symbolic group affiliation. By exaggerating this gesture to the point of artificiality, the artist offers a visual commentary on expectations placed upon the male body in sport and mass culture—especially the racialized body, often burdened with representing strength, sacrifice, and spectacle.
There are, albeit indirectly, echoes of artists who investigate how racialized bodies are shaped for public display: fabricated, exhibited, and consumed within symbolic circuits of power. Froiid introduces a layer of dissonance into this process: while his images appear visually clean and effective, they feel strangely hollow, as though something within them is displaced. The series title evokes the popular saying that associates speech with entrapment: it is by the mouth that the fish is caught—or, in this case, that the logic of spectacle is revealed.
If in O Peixe pela Boca the gesture is noisy—repeated, amplified, manufactured—then in O Bom Cabrito Não Berra, Froiid places his faith in the power of silence. Now working with direct photography, captured by the artist himself, he presents the image of an amateur footballer in a contemplative posture, alone on a field with no apparent action. Part of a larger series, the work blends staging and documentation to capture the interval: the moment when the game has yet to begin or has already ended. The popular saying that gives the work its title suggests not just restraint, but cunning—a silence that watches, calculates, and chooses not to expose itself. This non-event becomes, here, a form of archive: not of glory, but of pause; not of heroic gesture, but of what escapes narrative.
Another animal-inspired expression continues the exhibition, now overflowing from image to space. In Galinha Caolha Procura Poleiro Mais Cedo, Froiid presents four button football fields painted directly on MDF boards fitted to the gallery's columns. The title, inspired by the 1977 samba of the same name performed by Velha da Portela, anticipates the way fabulation operates here: through metaphors, popular sayings, and survival strategies. The samba evokes the figure of the wary one-eyed hen who, out of prudence, seeks her roost before dark. The lyrics suggest cunning, anticipation, and caution—values cultivated in vulnerable contexts, where predicting the other’s move may be a matter of survival. Froiid shifts this image to the artistic field, creating sabotaged and distorted game boards that force the body to reposition its gaze and rethink the rules of the game. Like the samba’s hen, the player here does not seek a trophy, but safety: a way to keep playing even when the board seems to have changed.
Through this gesture, the artist also pays homage to Geraldo Décourt (1911–1998), modernist painter and creator of button football in Brazil. Décourt not only invented a game but gave it cultural form: he established rules, organized championships, and created a unique vocabulary. His practice moved between art and play, canvas and board, grounded in the belief that games could be a language. Froiid revisits this tradition and destabilizes it: his fields do not follow fixed rules or simulate sporting logic—they are skewed spaces, marked by improvisation, calling the viewer to shift their stance. If Décourt structured the game as a system, Froiid turns it into metaphor: the roost sought is not one of victory, but of memory, cunning, and the possibility of continuing to play.
The act of playing button football weaves through the exhibition insistently. In the illuminated panels Ribaltas, it reappears condensed in the image of the thumb—the decisive finger in button football, the one that pushes the piece and starts the play. Installed above the tables, the drawings of “little fingers” become ambiguous emblems: they point, command, and perform simultaneously. Like stage footlights, they cast light over the symbolic game that runs through the entire exhibition. Here, the gesture is concentrated and minimal, but also always out of place: displaced, reiterated, decontextualized. We no longer know exactly what move it triggers or which match it belongs to. Its repetition evokes memories but does not anchor them.
By choosing this gesture as a recurring figure, Froiid reaffirms something that resonates throughout the exhibition: the idea that entire stories are contained within minimal movements—kisses, touches, silences, pauses. It is not a matter of reenacting the game but of suggesting that it continues, even after it has supposedly ended. Froiid’s practice thus operates against the fixity of the archive: it does not seek to restore what has been lost, but to fabulate what could have been. His gesture is that of a player who knows the rules but chooses another move—made of noise, detours, reinventions. Perhaps that is why, in the end, lowering one’s arm is not a gesture of surrender, but of attentiveness. And above all, of refusal. In light of this exhibition, I return to the memory of being a teenager trying to understand football as a form of togetherness. If, at the time, I could not find my place on the field or among the fans, perhaps now, in this game of images, I rediscover the gesture that once eluded me: another possible football, made of pauses, silences, and small fabulations.
