São Paulo- To promote Qatar as the host of the 2022 World Cup, the Qatari bid committee sponsored a trip by Brazilian photographer Caio Vilela to eight Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa and a photography exhibition. The exhibition was shown in Doha during the World Cup. Now the photographer wants to make it into a book for publication in Brazil.
“The idea is to prepare an elegant edition, making football into art, with bilingual text about culture and football in the Arab world, pleasing both for reading and for the ‘coffee table’ format," said Vilela. He explains that he would also like to set up an exhibition with pictures of his trip in São Paulo.
In March this year, Vilela had already worked on an exhibition at the Football Museum, in the capital city of São Paulo state, that goes by the same name, where he showed pictures of street football in several countries around the world, among them Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, and which were included in book “Futebol Sem Fronteiras” (Football Without a Border). As a result, he was contacted by the Qatari bid committee, which invited him to travel to other Arab countries to show his pictures.
Vilela travelled to Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Oman and Egypt, once again. For this work, he visited 35 cities. At the end of the trip, the photographer had over 1,000 usable images, out of which 60 were selected for the exhibition. “I tried to work on a photographic marathon to try to find several football pitches in the most varied of settings," he revealed.
According to him, street football in the Arab world is very similar to that in Brazil. "There is the ritual in which everybody finds a pitch to play on in the late afternoon," he said.
In Qatar, exhibition "Koora Al Arabia" took place in the Doha Market, in a space dedicated to football, established during the last World Cup, in South Africa. At the site, there was also a large screen for fans to watch the matches as well as electronic games for those present to enjoy themselves. "It went way beyond my expectations, the space was gigantic," he said.
The exhibition was so successful that Brazilian embassy in Pakistan invited Vilela to show the “Futebol Sem Fronteiras” pictures.
Vilela explains that the photographs exhibited in Doha were enlarged at the Metro Imaging, in London, one of the best development laboratories in the world. The Qatari bid committee should transform the images in the exhibition into a catalogue, to be published with texts in English and Arabic.
*Translated by Mark Ament
