The new MIS Experience exhibition, in São Paulo, is made for those who are football fanatics, but “mainly for those who don’t like it”. This is what Paulo Bonfá, curator of “Brasil em Todas”, says, an exhibition opened this Wednesday (8) with videos, audios and artifacts from the national team on the eve of the opening of the World Cup.
The name comes from the fact that Brazil is the only country to participate in every World Cup — ever since teams took long boat trips to the World Cup, where players trained on the high seas and ended up gaining a few pounds. This is one of the curiosities on the pages of old newspapers magnified in space.
“Most people have always followed the World Cup through the stories told in the media”, says Bonfá. This was the path chosen in the exhibition, which builds a narrative based on press records — including material from the Sheet.
There is a lot of history in the newspaper clippings for what Bonfá calls “elements for bar table conversation”. In the 1930 World Cup, there was still no referee. “Bolivia’s coach, for example, was a judge in another game, a linesman in another and in the final he was the assistant in the game between Uruguay and Argentina.”
In the following World Cup, Palestra Itália, formerly Palmeiras, did not want to give players to the team because they thought the local championship was more important. The club then hired armed security guards and hid the players on a farm in Matão, in the interior of São Paulo, for fear of having the athletes groomed.
India, which had never played in the World Cup, would come to Brazil in 1950, but FIFA prohibited players without boots from playing barefoot. “It’s so that people have this notion that, when it started, it didn’t have this glamour, money, structure and repercussion.”
It is possible to see how the way people consume — and talk — about football has changed. “Before, there weren’t even words in Portuguese to describe, for example, a team — ‘team’ was used in English”, says Bonfá.
In audio, the show features remarkable goals — the fourth in the 1970 World Cup final, against Italy, for example — and disappointing ones — Uruguay’s unexpected second in the 1950 final — with period radio narration. On video, there is a special with rare images from the four World Cups in which Pelé played.
The exhibition also focuses on interactivity. In a booth, the visitor tries to shout a goal for as long as possible. There are physical games — such as the challenge of isolating the ball like Baggio in the 1994 final penalty — and digital games — guessing games and Pac-Man, among others.
In addition to life-size realistic statues of Pelé and Zagallo, the exhibition features rare artifacts, provided by the Brazilian Football Confederation, the CBF. Among them are the gifts that each host country gave to Brazil for participating in the World Cup and the only existing records of the creation of the team, in 1914.
The capital of São Paulo has at least three more exhibitions related to football during the World Cup.
The ViaFoto Institute, in Pinheiros, is showing the exhibition “Football: Territory-Ecstasy”. It brings together works by more than 20 photographers who portray the sport played on a daily basis and its relationship with the city and society. Sesc Pompeia opens this Wednesday (10) the “Cup Collectors”, which brings together more than 200 popular objects related to the history of the competition — button football, promotional soft drink caps, dolls, coins, t-shirts and other artifacts, curated by Marcelo Duarte.
The journalist, in fact, is also the curator of “Amarelinha”, on display at the Football Museum. The exhibition, which features original shirts from the national team, tells the story of how Brazil came to wear the famous Canarian uniform.
The shirts were obtained through the efforts of five collectors who, for the curator, deserve praise for their resistance in not selling the objects, coveted around the world. There are original shirts from 1958 to 2022. “We just didn’t get the one from 1954,” he says.
That was the first World Cup in which Brazil wore yellow, after wearing white in previous World Cups. The traumatic defeat to Uruguay in 1950 saw the end of the old uniform. Then the Rio newspaper Correio da Manhã proposed a competition for the public to design what the team’s new clothes would be.
The curious thing, says Duarte, is that the winner of the competition, Aldyr Schlee, was a 19-year-old cartoonist from Rio Grande do Sul who lived on the border of Brazil and Uruguay. “He felt half Brazilian and half Uruguayan.”
It is interesting to see how public opinion treated the white shirt —a piece without soul and identity— and celebrated the details and colors of the new uniform. Even more so is noticing the many drafts that Schlee made until he arrived at the final result.
Between video testimonials from Schlee and Brazilian stars, the shirts are the big attraction. Panels highlight the evolution of materials —from cotton to polyester— and the aesthetics of uniforms over the decades.
There are 18 shirts for 17 World Cups, because Duarte wanted to wear Ronaldo and Edmundo’s clothes in 1998. “They tell the story of the final against France — Ronaldo goes to the hospital, Edmundo is selected and then he is ‘de-escalated’.”
Not all are yellow. There is space for three blue models — Rivellino’s in 1978, Ronaldinho Gaúcho’s in 2002 and Vinícius Júnior’s in 2022. And there is also a goalkeeper’s uniform — the one worn by Waldir Peres in the 1982 World Cup. in 1962.
