"O CANECO É NOSSO!", a work created by artist and curator Froiid for MAM Rio, brings together a thousand replicas of the Jules Rimet Trophy, designed by sculptor Abel Lafleur in 1930 and temporarily awarded to the winning teams of the World Cup.
The cup circulated among various countries until it definitively remained in Brazil after the 1970 World Cup victory, where it acquired meanings that transcended the sporting field: the trophy operated as a propaganda tool for the military dictatorship, which anchored in the success of the national team an image of economic and social progress. Its journey reached a turning point precisely in 1983, during the period of political opening, when it was stolen from the CBF headquarters in Rio de Janeiro and disappeared permanently. With this installation, the artist brings the story to the present, gathering a multitude of cups from which one is subtracted. In this way, he updates tensions and disputes surrounding its meaning, showing the popular appropriations of the symbol.
With "O CANECO É NOSSO!", Froiid displaces the cup and its history from its original context in an aesthetic and critical operation. The artist's references traverse the Situationist avant-garde, a movement that brings together art, play, and everyday experience, mixing them with his personal experiences and forms of urban sociability: rooftop barbecues, amateur football, or billiards, among others. In doing so, he subverts the canon of Brazilian art 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 continually reorganize themselves. His work combines a deep knowledge of art history with experiences rooted in everyday life and urban sociability, especially Black and male sociability, highlighting an understanding of Brazilian culture as a continuous system of collective creation.
