The Corner Man.

I am the ‘corner’ man for AS Velasca, the football club founded to play, and as a Fine Art performance, by artist Wolfgang Natlacen.

Clamber to the roof of the Duomo in Milan and scan the cityscape, the surrounding plains of Lombardia and the distant backdrop of mountains.  Famed dome and basilica still peek amidst the new and not so new, and close by is the concrete brutalist 1950s masterpiece, Torre Velasca.  So ugly, it is breathtaking in its odd beauty, or perhaps it is the other way around, so beautiful that the ugliness takes one’s breath away.  

The Torre Velasca gives the club its name, even style and ethos, and features on the team badge.  Torre Velasca didn’t have a football team, but since 2015, it has as one of many minor football teams in a city of significance and significant in football terms.  AS Velasca works up-table campaigns out on the pitch, while a parallel squad of artists in amateur, work the kit designs, the publicity, the Bulletin, the accoutrements and team gimmicks, the tickets, and the very profile of the football club.  
In tongue in cheek promotions, AS Velasca proclaims itself to be the second team in Milan, la seconda squadra di Milano.  It is a deliberately, provocatively absurd claim, but watch out Internazionale, look out Milan, you’d better get the San Siro rebuilt and up-to-post-covid-purpose, for think on regazze, one day it could be.

Art and sport alike are about promotion.  AS Velasca has kit contracts and art sponsors.
Some of the artists are definitely football folk and fans, some ambivalent.  I do cricket more.  AC Milan, was founded by British expatriates in the C19 as a Football and Cricket Club, (I’d love it if Italy were an international cricket force. That would be so cool!), and that did it for me.  Asked to join the squad, I was in.
On any team, you’re only as good as your latest performance.  Nimbler, hungry, able bodies are always challenging for your position in the line-up.  For now, I hold the corner flags spot.

 

Smitten by the pandemic, the lower leagues are suspended.  Matches scratched, game results X - X.  Team Sweatshirts that may never be worn become artworks on clothes hangers.  It is truly a Milan thing where just about everything has to work well on a fashion design clothes hanger.  
This season’s corner flags might never flap in earnest.  Mere artworks only.
But I’m the corner man and Table Soccer has kept us lockdown busy.  The players have painted the figurines, one apiece, and the artists have the table to adorn.  It’s a work in progress, and we know there is a flaw in the project as Table Soccer is too intimate to play just now.  
Here are the painted players, and below in poignant still deconstructed view, my table soccer corners.

Our playing field goes beyond the limits. A.S. Velasca is a 360° project where the artists will invent us, describe us.

artists
75070 / ALESSANDRO BELUSSI / CAZAENTRE & NNOIR / ANDREA CERNOTTO / ANNALISA CUZZOCREA / PRIMAVERA DE FILIPPI / STEPHEN DEAN / KEVIN JACKSON / JAY ONE / ANDREA MAZZACAVALLO / WOLFGANG NATLACEN / PATRIZIA NOVELLO / ZHUO QI / NADA PIVETTA / ERIC POUGEAU / DAVID SHRIGLEY / THOMAS SIGNOLLET / PATRICIA WALLER / THOMAS WATTEBLED
sponsor artists
KENDELL GEERS / FRANCESCA BELGIOJOSO / PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU / JIANG LI / ZEVS / RÉGIS SÉNÈQUE

A project by Marco De Girolamo, Karim Khideur, Loris Mandelli, Wolfgang Natlacen and Clément Tournus.