Zeroazero is a video work that takes its cue from the final match of the 1982 Football World Cup to stage a game without a ball. Two teams face off on the field, the crowd cheers, a goal is scored — but the ball is absent. The object of the game is missing, and with it vanish the meaning, direction, and purpose of the athletic action. The players’ gestures turn into absurd choreography, their fury and tactics into grotesque performance, the stadium into a space of collective euphoria.

The work investigates the symbolic power of football as a ritual of identity and a device of national belonging, especially in Italy of the 1980s, when sport became a shared narrative and a form of political celebration. Today, amid nationalist political parties, sports newspapers, and fervent supporters, the sacredness of football has become permanent. But Zeroazero performs a radical gesture: by removing the ball — the invisible fulcrum around which all action revolves — it interrupts the fiction, suspends credibility, and exposes the spectacular machine and the social body that sustains it.

The video acts as a critical device: it alters historical footage and, with it, the shared memory, challenging the national imaginary built around sporting epic. What remains on the field, after this subtraction, is an emptied collective dance, exposed in its symbolic nakedness: an identity sustained by the game’s illusion, which, once deprived of its center, reveals itself as pure spectacle.