3 sided Football
Performance
Biennale de Lyon, 2009
Centre Pompidou Metz, 2010
CAC Brétigny, 2011

Three-sided football is a variation of association football with three teams instead of the usual two. It was devised by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn to explain his notion of triolectics, his refinement on the Marxian concept of dialectics, as well as to disrupt one's everyday idea of football. Played on a hexagonal pitch [1], the game can be adapted for similarity to soccer as well as other versions of football.

Unlike in conventional football, where the winner is determined by the highest scoring of the two teams, no score is kept of the goals which a team scores, but conversely a count is taken of the number of goals conceded and the winning team is that which concedes the least number of goals. The game purports to deconstruct the confrontational and bi-polar nature of conventional football as an analogy of class struggle in which the referee stands as a signifier of the state and media apparatus, posturing as a neutral arbitrator in the political process of ongoing class struggle.



JST