The World Cup Project
The World Cup Project use visual art to tell the history of the World Cup – the quadrennial world championship tournament for the game of soccer (association football). Beginning with the inaugural tournament in 1930, each piece in the series is portraying one particular World Cup by artistically layering imagery, diagrams, tables, text, drawing and writing. Each World Cup portrait capture, in a single piece of art, the essence and important and defining details of a tournament — including elements such as its host nation and cities, participating countries, tournament structure, match results, key players, popular playing styles, tournament ball design, hints at the historical and geopolitical context in which the tournament was held and planned, and much more.
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1930 World Cup
1934 World Cup
1938 World Cup
1950 World Cup
1954 World Cup
The creative process
The World Cup Project was born and planned as a digital art project to maximize its reach and the flexibility with which it can be shared. While the final product is digital, the ideas, inspirations, and storytelling in The World Cup Project, start with pen and paper. Throughout an extensive period of research, artist and scientist Soren Meibom, collects facts, figures, and stories, and draws sketches creating interesting visuals of key people, events, buildings, and items related to a given tournament. This research forms the basis for understanding the historical context in which the tournament was planned and held, and how different nations and players were affected. And it leads to the collection of intriguing and relevant visuals that can be manipulated to meet the artistic vision for each piece, as well as for the whole series.
Following the collection and manipulation phase, the creative process of visual story-telling begins. I think of it as a 2-dimensional installation where I arrange and represent all these parallel stories through imagery, diagrams, tables, text, drawing and writing. They are stories about countries, teams, legendary players and referees, about politics, places and events, and of the evolution of the World Cup and of the game itself. And I’m weaving them all into one story about a single World Cup tournament, while keeping as my most important goal that the final image, as a whole, should be an intriguing and captivating piece of visual art.
The guides
Each piece in The World Cup Project has its own “content guide” providing details on the many individual elements in every artwork. The content guides are also available in digital format and can be accessed and displayed in a variety of ways. It is the intention of the artist that the artworks should be enjoyed and scrutinized first without reading the guide. Each piece is created with the joy of discovery in mind. The guides then helps with more facts and details about the things that were found in the artwork.
