The key to change many things
Football for Hope is the title of the exhibition that Casa Árabe is hosting at its two headquarters in Madrid and Cordoba until February 2023. A project conceived by Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita, taking advantage of the fact that for the first time in history a football World Cup will be held in an Arab country, Qatar.
Both artists have opted for that other World Cup, the one that is written in small letters, the one that shows how football unfolds its full force as a tool for social change. Both artists explored this aspect in the wake of the first World Cup held in Africa in 2010, the one that gave the first world title to the Spanish national team. "We realised, they point out, that balls roll every day in many places to fight for gender equality, social inclusion, integration, in short, to contribute to building better and fairer societies".
Large mural photographs and others that capture very special details make up this exhibition, based on these modest and anonymous teams, in which so many Arab boys and girls take refuge, who have arrived in Spain in difficult conditions, but who have begun to strengthen their dreams from these fields of hope. Fields often of fortune, urban plots of land and stones, or of felt or artificial turf in the best of cases, but where they score the goals of their particular successes on a daily basis: feeling that they belong to a community, learning the importance of teamwork and rules.
As Zurita and De Pablo say, "they don't have millions of fans screaming in unison as they watch them dribble, but the game they play is the most important game of their lives". In these snapshots, you can see the traits of joy, grounded in these dreams of hope, as they try to overcome the hard burdens they come with: inequality, the weight of a difficult childhood, which has often seen serious family problems.
Football thus becomes a tool to help them get ahead. They are in teams unknown to the general public: Alacranas from Hortaleza, Darna from Barcelona, Dragones y Dragonas from Lavapiés, Jugones from Villanueva de la Cañada, with counterparts in other continents such as Football for Hope from South Africa. Teams that Alacranas' coach, Javier Fernández "Cambro", describes as "a big pirate ship that rescues broken people to help them get afloat".
"It's the key to changing a lot of things," says Zanele Menwale, coach of the Play Soccer project in the Johannesburg suburb of Ethafeni. "These are children fighting for their rights, and sometimes their lives, armed only with a football". It is, then, the other World Cup played out on the fields of hope.
Zanele Menwale concludes: "Hygiene, health and birth control are as important tools as education to give a chance to these girls who are attracted by the magnetism of football". The undisputed universal sport of the masses is a tool capable of breaking down walls, both inside and outside the game. As Moroccan Fatima Boubkri, from the Madres Dragonas de Lavapiés team, tells us, this is attested to by the numerous examples of how it changes people's lives and makes them better.