“If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it's your duty as an American to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift or the jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well, I say cheating is the gift man gives himself!”

Charles Montgomery Burns,
“Mountain of Madness”, The Simpsons.

by Chung-Leng Tran

When we talk about sports, we more often refer to T.V. shows of which we are the viewers than to the practice itself of any sport. Sports and images now go so well together that they have become almost inseparable. Or, to put it differently, the practice of sports and its visual representation are now one. Besides, sports are often associated with competition and its stakes (1). This culture of winning comes from the degree to which sports seem to have contaminated the rest of society and particularly the world of business where each employee is asked to be competitive and a winner. Nonetheless, the real definition of sports is a physical activity organized by the rules of a game.
Valentina Loi, the artist we present in Portfolio, centers her work on the subject of games and its component of play by awakening our ability to play, an ability we have the tendency to lose when growing up. As for the texts, they focus on cinema (“Godard: tennis and dialectics” by Sylvain Dreyer, “Watermarks” by Florence Pillet, “In the loneliness of the football field” by Daria Joubert, and “Muhammad Ali: a boxer on the screen” by Chung-Leng Tran), but contemporary art is not left behind as Jean-Baptiste de Beauvais’ article on the book “Beauty of the Gesture” shows. Football is also widely present in this issue with the photographic work of Andrew McLeish about a supporter of the English Portsmouth Football Club, Alice Marsal’s “Number 10”, Chung-Leng Tran’s “The Landscape of Lower League Football”, and the fore-mentioned Daria Joubert’s article, thus proving that football is definitely a very popular sport that cannot be ignored.
As in every issue of Edit : we publish in In:Edit the work of an artist we wish to support. This time we present RUS by Gert Jochems, a series of black and white and color photographs taken in Siberia.
As Edit : number 4 is dedicated to sports, the publication was initially planned for the end of June, to coincide with the World Cup of 2006. The Edit : team had thus prepared itself for a 400m race, but as time ran out, the distance grew farther, and 400m became 800m and from a single racetrack we finally had to run a marathon! The making of this issue has not been an easy one, and we, albeit out of breath (and a bit late), are glad to welcome you again on the Edit: website.
 

Notes

(1) During the 2006 World Cup in Germany, French footballer Thierry Henry declared at a press conference that, in contradiction to Pierre de Coubertin’s motto, the most important thing was not to participate but really to win.