ARTIST: Malena Guerrieri

MATERIALS: Reclaimed Argentine leather

METHOD: Hand-stitched

Part of Malena Guerrieri's ongoing La Caprichosa series, these hand-stitched footballs are made using archived leather remnants sourced from her family's tannery in Argentina.

Combining materials originally produced across different industries and decades, each ball becomes a unique composition of colors, textures, and histories. Existing somewhere between sports equipment, sculpture, and archive, the series explores football as both a cultural object and a carrier of memory, while preserving a handcraft tradition that is increasingly disappearing from contemporary production.

THIS WAS PRESENTED AS PART OF OBJECTS AT PLAY EXHIBITION. Each piece is unique in color composition, texture, and stitching variations. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

"I’m interested in working with leather not only as the original material of football, but also as a surface where color, handwork, and identity intersect. Each ball reactivates something from a tradition that is slowly disappearing."

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Malena Guerrieri (b. 1988, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual artist whose practice explores material culture, craft traditions, and collective memory. Working across sculpture, installation, and participatory projects, she often uses found and discarded materials to investigate the stories embedded in everyday objects. La Caprichosa is her ongoing series centered on football as both object and cultural artifact.