This Means More

A crowd simulation software serves as a tool for exploring football supporters’ collective memory. Images of crowd simulation are faced with testimonies from Liverpool Football Club’s supporters who recall their experience marked by a tragic event: the Hillsborough stadium disaster, in 1989, which changed the nature of the game of football.
Football has always had a mixed relationship with crowd. Both a public space for profane culture and a control apparatus, the stadium embodies this conflicted relationship. At a time when working class supporters get banned due to financial and security pressures, I want to use a contemporary visual tool, crowd simulation, to explore the history of this exclusion. The stadium being a microcosm for society, its evolution relates to broader social changes that happened over the last thirty years.

Nicolas Gourault was an artist in residence at Werkleitz in Halle in 2023 as a fellow of the European Media Art Platform (EMAP). EMAP was initiated by Werkleitz and is co-funded by Creative Europe of the European Union.