The Oval

"The Oval" is the venue where, in 1870, was played the first international football match between the national teams of England and Scotland. From then, the football conquered the rest of the world. When I was a child, in Spain, we were playing on the streets all day long, in sand fields or hard roads, it didn´t matter, we just needed a ball and a couple of sticks, that was all. Unfortunately, nowadays it is very difficult to find people in our Western cities playing football freely, wildly, forgetting the differences between them, but happily, in many other places over the world is still possible to find that kind of scenes. The football is not just a global sport, It is a language with which it is really easy to drop down the walls that our fears have built between the people. It doesn´t matter where you are because, when the game starts, everybody forgets all the differences to each other. The love towards football is in the heart of the most people, anywhere, and it fills with smiles all the faces. "The Oval" is a visual message against the radicality and the intolerance that sadly are growing in the world, showing that everybody is enjoying the same game. For this project, I have used 35 mm analogue cameras and black and white film. -- Nacho Rivera.