CHANGING ROOMS: CHIARA CALGARO’S QUEER SOCCER ODYSSEY

Locker rooms, scarves, and trading cards: the photographer remixes football culture with queer teams across Europe, building a playful handbook for collective freedom.

ALESSIA CALIENDO

A locker room is supposed to be a corridor between worlds: you enter as yourself, and you exit as “the team.” In Chiara Calgaro’s Changing Room, published by Altana, that corridor becomes the work, a liminal chamber where soccer’s most policed rituals are slowed down, rewired, sometimes gently mocked, until they start telling a different story.

The cast is translocal and fiercely specific: GAP in Bologna, where an assembly is as foundational as a formation; Quadrato Meticcio in Padua; Phoenix Tigers in Dublin; Les Dégommeuses in Paris; Cacahuètes Sluts in Marseille; Drama Queer FC; Roter Stern Berlin FLINTA*; DFC Kreuzberg; and the gravitational pull of Istanbul’s Queer Olympix, a three-day occupation of sport as collective visibility.

Calgaro photographs bodies that refuse easy legibility: faces swallowed by jerseys; tenderness disguised as “training”; parody gestures that turn the mainstream iconography of football into something like poetry with cleats. The book seals that ambition by folding image into theory.

In the volume Alma Sammel reads the changing room through liminality and the lenses of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Butler, while Deniz Nihan Aktan maps queer feminist activist amateur football as a living movement, where the question shifts from “who are we playing against?” to “what are we playing for?”

In other words, this is not a photobook about soccer. It is a manual for rehearsing freedom, one cramped bench at a time.

The Interview

THE LOCKER ROOM, FROM HIERARCHICAL BACKSTAGE TO A MICROCOSM OF REHEARSAL. WHAT WAS THE MOMENT WHEN YOU REALIZED YOU WERE NOT CHOOSING A SETTING, BUT ACTIVATING A POLITICAL DEVICE?

From the start, Changing Room felt inseparable from my biography and my personal urgencies, beginning with my love for soccer and the fact that I play on a transfeminist, queer team.

The locker room became clearer to me as a political device during our team assemblies. Twice a month, we meet there before practice. We talk logistics and tactics, yes, but we also check in: we ask how we are doing, we question how to improve our self-managed practices, how to bring our values onto the field.

We ask what it takes to make the game space safer for everyone, and how to respond to sexist or transphobic comments from referees, opposing teams, or their supporters. Building new scenarios of play, and of existence, inside the locker room turned it into a metaphor for transformation and imagination, far beyond its primary use.

IN SOCCER, MOVEMENT IS AN ALPHABET: SPRINT, TACKLE, EMBRACE, CELEBRATION. YOU SPEAK ABOUT BODIES THAT PERFORM AND ABOUT PARODY-GESTURES. WHICH GESTURE, ONCE PHOTOGRAPHED, FELT MOST ABLE TO COLLAPSE CATEGORIES WITHOUT NEEDING EXPLANATIONS?

Many images in Changing Room play with gender stereotypes, appearances, and the visual codes we are used to reading.

Sometimes it is explicit, like the photograph of a person whose face disappears behind their hair while they lace up their cleats, wearing, instead of shorts, a “skirt” made from their team’s supporters’ scarves.

Other times, the image stays more open, and for that reason categorization becomes unnecessary. I am thinking of a photograph of a person in a red soccer kit, bent forward on the field, with a second jersey pulled off and draped over their face almost to the ground, creating the illusion of a second presence in front of them.

In that case, the invitation to imagination is extreme. The ambiguity of what, at first glance, seems like another human body forces us to question how we look, how we recognize, and how quickly we label.

DURING YOUR JOURNEY ACROSS EUROPE AMONG QUEER TEAMS, WHAT TRULY CHANGES FROM COUNTRY TO COUNTRY? NOT ONLY CULTURAL CLIMATE, BUT THE CODES OF THE BODY, OF CELEBRATION, OF FEAR. DID YOU NOTICE DIFFERENCES IN LOCKER-ROOM RITUALS, PROTECTION STRATEGIES, AND THE VISIBILITY THAT IS GRANTED OR NEGOTIATED?

To make Changing Room, I photographed in Bologna, Padua, Paris, Marseille, Dublin, Berlin, and Istanbul.

Istanbul is where I most clearly felt a queer community that is cohesive, compact, and organized. Maybe because queer lives are policed more harshly, I was welcomed by a community that was united, proud, and full of energy.

Unlike other European cities, there were almost no transfeminist flags visible in urban space, outside venues or in shop windows. In their place, there was an invisible, buzzing, subversive network of people who know how and where to meet. When those bodies come together, the restraints imposed by society seem to fall away.

I saw far more bodies undress and show, with pride, the marks of their gender-affirmation paths. Where institutional visibility is lower, I sensed a stronger need to create safer spaces where you can show yourself, play, party, exist.

WHEN DID YOU DECIDE THAT CHANGING ROOM HAD TO BECOME A BOOK, NOT ONLY AN EXHIBITION OR AN ONLINE SERIES? WHAT DID THE BOOK OBJECT ALLOW THAT OTHER FORMATS COULD NOT HOLD?

The need to turn Changing Room into a book came from the desire to create a concrete, “finished” object, able to circulate and be experienced in a more personal and intimate way than an exhibition, which is always conditioned by the exhibition space.

The book also contains two in-depth texts that ask for slower time. They invite you into the project with more awareness.

The image sequence follows a structure that returns the full process of the work. The opening image, meant like a curtain, introduces soccer and the gaze. The following images deal with performance and the invisibilization of certain bodies. The sticker collection recalls the iconic language of mainstream soccer cards, but proposes new models and imaginaries.

Even the written descriptions of the teams, the colophon, and the acknowledgements page, paired with one of the preparatory drawings I used before shooting, restore the choral, participatory dimension from which Changing Room took shape.

THE BOOK INCLUDES STICKER PACKS THAT EXPLICITLY ECHO TRADING CARDS AND COLLECTION. IS IT A WAY TO ENTER SOCCER’S POPULAR LANGUAGE AND SABOTAGE IT FROM WITHIN, OR TO BUILD ANOTHER IDEA OF BELONGING, MORE HORIZONTAL, MORE PLAYFUL, MORE TRANSFEMINIST?

Both.

Including a pack of six stickers in every copy, as part of a collection of 22 portraits, came from the desire to appropriate the language of the iconic Panini albums, historically reserved for men’s soccer and only recently opened to women’s soccer, in order to overturn it. The stickers propose faces and subjectivities that exceed the standards of gender binarism on which sport is built.

At the same time, in the transfeminist and queer teams I met, stickers are a widespread tool for circulating slogans and values, and for becoming visible.

My wish is that these stickers can be used freely: to complete the collection in the book, to decorate its cover, but also to travel elsewhere, across subway stops, club bathrooms, poles and railings. I am interested in breaking the “sacredness” of the art book as an elite object, letting it slip out of its niche and infiltrate unexpected spaces.

IF MAINSTREAM SOCCER IS SPECTACLE, YOU RETURN THE GAME AS RELATIONSHIP AND A TOOL FOR SELF-DETERMINATION. WHAT IDEA OF COMMUNITY WOULD YOU LIKE TO LINGER AFTER THE LAST PAGE, AND WHAT DO YOU HOPE THE READER WILL DO, CONCRETELY, AFTER CLOSING THE BOOK?

I do not want to suggest a single interpretation of the work. One of its values is precisely the possibility for anyone who flips through it to grasp aspects and readings that were not even in my intentions.

That said, I hope an idea of community emerges that is not vulnerable or victimized, but strong, with a transformative and imaginative power. A community capable of creating spaces of freedom and fun, of overturning rules and inventing new ones.

I hope the reader feels the power of play. From a simple “let’s pretend that…,” brave ways of imagining what we do not like can be born.

Concretely, I hope that after closing the book, people will go out and stick the Changing Room cards everywhere, helping the book’s physical boundaries collapse too.