Gabriel Fontana on Eroticising Sport into Play, Binaries into Tensions, Design into Seduction

What do we learn about our bodies – how they move, how they relate – through the rituals, rules and expectations of sport? If sport teaches us aesthetics, hierarchies, patriarchies and competition, what does that mean for how we play with each other – across a boardroom table, in the streets and between the sheets? Gabriel Fontana is a designer unravelling the values ingrained in us through team sports and the ways we cheer as adults. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘queer phenomenology’ – how everyday objects, rituals and interactions enforce heteronormative behaviour and values – Fontana exposes sport’s role in disciplining us into binary, competitive and patriarchal ways of thinking and relating. However, the pervasiveness of sport also presents the opportunity to untrain us. His work disrupts these structures, awakening self-empowerment and pleasure through play, imagination and the rewriting of rules. This is an inherently erotic act – beginning at the level of the individual and their relationship to their own body and to others.

By queering sport – through fluid rules and shifting alliances – and placing it in unexpected contexts, Fontana challenges not only the arena but also its surrounding institutions. He brings teams and screams into museums, turns art academies into sites of sweat and uniforms, and transforms middle schools into spaces of imaginative play.
Now, he turns his gaze to the spectators. In his project queering the Dutch Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Fontana will interrogate the sports bar – a space of shared passion built on opposition. His research into cheerleading in the lead-up to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics extends this inquiry: what do we learn from how we cheer?
On the eve of his flagship MoMA installation, we speak with the French designer about how he moves through cities, relationships and his own work, his strategies of seduction and designing the immaterial relations between bodies, and his personal motivations behind eroticising the binaries that might otherwise stultify.

Nadine Botha: You are currently setting up your work for the opening this year of ‘Pirouette: Turning Points in Design,’ an exhibition at MoMA. What are your impressions of New York?
Gabriel Fontana: I love this city. There’s an immediate familiarity, even on a first visit. I think it’s because of all the American movies and media – it creates an uncanny experience of coming from a virtual reality in which one is intimately familiar with all of the city’s buildings, streets and architecture before actually entering the physical environment. It makes me feel at home instantly.

Nadine: How do you move through cities?
Gabriel: It’s interesting because cities and public spaces in the Netherlands are hyper-designed, predefined and controlled. That has many positives – everything runs smoothly and efficiently – but as a French person who grew up in Paris, with its unique kind of chaos, I always feel a little anxious amid so much order. Paris is chaotic in the best way – we love to criticise authority, occupy public spaces and go on strike. Especially the 18^th arrondissement where I grew up. It’s a dense, busy, African neighbourhood where people constantly claim public space – whether sitting at a café, on a bench or just being in the street. And the weather is no better than in the Netherlands!

Nadine: Growing up in such a big city must have shaped how you played as a child.
Gabriel: I had limited opportunities to play outdoors, so I was drawn to imaginative play. Playmobil was my world – freeform play, without strict rules or predefined outcomes. What fascinated me was the open-endedness – how I could create stories, build relationships between characters and invent entire worlds without being confined by rigid structures. What is interesting is that this type of play can be engaged in alone by yourself, or by creating worlds together with other kids.

Nadine: That doesn’t sound too far off from your En Jeu project (2024) developed at La Ferme du Buisson, in which children imagine fictional societies and sports federations to represent them, including inventing the sports, logos, flags and slogans. Does freeform play continue to influence your work?
Gabriel: That same spirit of imaginative play is central to my work. Play is about creating spaces where people can explore, experiment and reimagine their relationships – with each other and their environments. The games and experiences I design reflect that child-hood sense of open-endedness, inviting participants to co-create and bend the rules or even rewrite them entirely.

Nadine: Is it different working with kids than with adults?
Gabriel: Kids naturally embrace ambiguity and inventiveness in ways that adults resist. They can hyperfocus and leave reality behind. For adults, it’s much harder to enter that space – we’re conditioned to be goal oriented, to prioritise structure. We’re conditioned to see rules as fixed, and structure as safety. By asking kids to create their own rules or sports, I invite them to reclaim agency and creativity – and even their erotic power.

Nadine: What is the relationship between rules and the erotic?
Gabriel: Rules create tension, anticipation and possibility – just like in a game, where bending or breaking the rules can lead to new strategies and unexpected surprises. In my life and work, I see rules as starting points, not constraints. I always ask: what happens if we blur or rewrite them?

Nadine: Does sport perhaps act as a substitute for play in adult life – a socially acceptable way to leave reality behind?
Gabriel: Absolutely, sport is one of the few culturally sanctioned spaces where adults can fully engage in play. It mediates interaction, emotion and connection. I once read that a stadium is one of the only places in society where men are ‘allowed’ to cry. Sport offers a space for emotional catharsis – not just for players but for spectators, too.

Nadine: How did you even come to be working with sport as a design medium?
Gabriel: I’m often asked this question, and I think it highlights the strong divide between creatives and athletes, between art and sport. However, I didn’t grow up with that binary, as my father was both a sports teacher and a teacher of film history – an unusual combination. Yet, he wasn’t an athlete in the traditional sense. He never watched sport, never talked about it, and had a way of being in a world that refused to fit into expectations.

Nadine: That must have been quite formative. What then was your own relationship with sport growing up?
Gabriel: I was good at it, but I never felt comfortable in sports classes. It was my first real encounter with a space where I was told exactly how to behave – how to move, how to interact with others, how to engage with the ball and equipment. It was my first experience of a rigid, normative system.

Nadine: Did this lead you to view sport as more than just a game?
Gabriel: Yes, from quite a young age I became sensitised to looking at sport as a metaphor for society. I began to see it as a practice of social reproduction – how we come to reproduce the norms, values and rules that are established in sport, and, in turn, how those same patterns play out in society. Sport is so much more than just physical activity; it reflects and reinforces cultural dyna-mics, expectations and power structures. What I’m most interested in is how these norms can be disrupted or transformed, using sport as a platform for imagining new ways of being and interacting.

Nadine: So, are you suggesting that sport being historically one of the most male-dominated spaces is a matter of design?
Gabriel: Sport has deep patriarchal roots. It was designed to train men – for war, for factory work, for dominance. Most modern team sports, like football and basketball, were standardised in the 19^th century, at the time of the industrial revolution, with this in mind. They weren’t designed for women or children. Their emphasis on competition and hierarchy reflects broader societal structures that favour masculinity and reinforce traditional power dynamics, and these power dynamics are evident in our political and value systems.

…The erotic in sport is about tension and connection – the way bodies interact in space, the anticipation of the next move, the vulnerability of being seen and touched…

Nadine: What then does sport teach us about eroticism – about how we relate, play and connect?
Gabriel: The erotic in sport is about tension and connection – the way bodies interact in space, the anticipation of the next move, the vulnerability of being seen and touched. There’s intimacy in sport, in its collective experience, and this can lead to connection and surprise. But that vulnerability means different things for different people, as everyone relates to their bodies differently. For some, sport is a space of power and confidence; for others, it’s one of exposure and discomfort.

Nadine: How do you relate to your body?
Gabriel: As you know, I’m very tall – almost two metres. I constantly experience how the world isn’t designed for all bodies. Planes, cars, metro seats, even doorways – I never fit. In fact, I’ve realised that I instinctively duck when walking through doors, whether I need to or not. My body has internalised the need to adapt.
As a queer person, this awareness extends beyond height. I’m always navigating how I take up space – especially in male-dominated environ-ments. In a recent workshop with students, we discussed how we sit differently depending on the space we’re in. A male-presenting person might avoid crossing their legs because it’s perceived as ‘feminine,’ while also taking up more space. Queer people often code-switch in these moments, adapting unconsciously to different environments.

Nadine: What would a sport – and by extension society and sexuality – imbued with queer and feminist values look like?
Gabriel: I recently met a coach here in New York who has spent fifteen years teaching kids basketball with a non-competitive approach. He said something that stuck with me: sport should prepare kids for the problems they’ll face as adults. Right now, we’re not teaching them useful values and qualities. In basketball, for example, kids are taught that in order to win they must identify the best player and organise the game around passing the ball to them, rather than learning teamwork and creativity. Thus, the first step is asking: what values do we want to promote? Then, we can invent and transform sports accordingly. This is what I’m trying to do with my work: redesign sport, redesign society.

Nadine: How is this intention of yours to redesign society through integrating queer perspective on sport been influenced by Sara Ahmed’s book Queer Phenomenology (2006)?
Gabriel: Ahmed’s brilliant book explores queer phenomenology, or how the world is designed in ways that shape expectations of behaviour and movement. Take a double bed, for example – it’s an object designed with the assumption that it will be used by either an individual or a couple. We don’t commonly see beds designed for three bodies, so already the bed is an object that acts as a compass pointing to relationships comprising two people. This subtly reinforces societal norms about relationships. In the same way, expectations about rules, interactions and power dynamics between people are also influenced by what we learn through sport.

Nadine: How does this translate to your work?
Gabriel: Queer pedagogy, which is how I understand my work, involves practices that make people aware of and challenge these norms – whether in gender identity, group dynamics, body standards, or processes of inclusion and exclusion. Precisely because sport is such a normative and normativising space, I think it holds immense potential to disrupt these structures.

Nadine: Challenging binary and codified norms is a consistent theme in your work. Is there a personal motivation behind this?
Gabriel: I see these themes in my personal life as well. I was polyamorous for many years, and when I first started developing this work while studying at Design Academy Eindhoven I had two partners. My housemate used to joke that my games were about that dynamic. But really, I was exploring and questioning expectations around relationships and love.
Being polyamorous was, in a way, a form of queer phenomenology – it made me question societal norms around romance and commitment. It wasn’t just about rebellion; it was about genuinely asking myself: what do I want? What are my needs and desires, independent of predefined structures? I think I extended this way of thinking into my work, creating experiences that allow others to explore their own relationships and interactions in new ways.

Nadine: Yes, both heteronormative relationships and team sports are typically based on a binary structure. How does Multiform (2019), the work that you started developing at Design Academy and that you have since then presented at numerous schools and cultural institutions, challenge this norm?
Gabriel: Multiform is played in a three-team format on a field originally designed by Asger Jorn, the Situationist artist, in the 1960s and 70s. What’s fascinating is that by adding a third team the game shifts from rigid competition to a more fluid and dynamic structure. Two teams can decide to collaborate against the third, but alliances are never fixed – they can change at any moment. This creates a constant renegotiation of strategies, relationships and interactions. It queers sport by making fluidity, collaboration and adaptability part of the game itself.

Nadine: So, the field is also the site of a multiplicity of different games with different rules and set-ups?
Gabriel: Yes, based on Jorn’s three-sided field I developed numerous games that each explore one of the infinite ways in which rules and team dynamics can be reimagined. For instance, I developed a transformable sports outfit that changes colour throughout the game. Every time a new colour appears on the outfit, the player becomes part of a new team. This means that alliances are constantly shifting, and players must continuously adapt to new group dynamics and roles. It disrupts the traditional idea of fixed teams and instead encourages flexibility, awareness and responsiveness. The game becomes less about winning against a set opponent and more about navigating ever-changing relationships and strategies.

Nadine: People must make a lot of mistakes with the rules changing all the time. To link back to what you said earlier, does this amplify the erotic qualities?
Gabriel: Mistakes – like passing the ball to someone from another team – become moments of discovery rather than failure. This amplifies the erotic by fostering fluidity, curiosity and connection. It’s also connected to how players – especially kids – always find ways to cheat or hack the system, something I hadn’t fully anticipated when designing the games.
I initially saw myself as the one hacking traditional sports structures by introducing shifting teams and evolving rules. But then I realised the participants were hacking my system too. For example, the game where outfits change colour throughout the play is designed so that only the final team’s outfit ends up determining the player’s score. During playtesting at schools, I noticed some kids gaming the system. They figured out which colour would appear last and only played for that team from the start, completely bypassing the intended fluidity. I was both impressed and shocked!
So, I adjusted the game, making sure the colours unfolded in an unpre-dictable order, preventing players from knowing in advance where they’d end up. It became this playful back-and-forth, where they tried to outsmart the system, and I had to redesign it to keep the spirit of the game intact. It really showed me that rule-breaking, mistakes and adaptation aren’t just inevitable – they’re actually part of the game’s deeper meaning.

Nadine: This also seems to challenge our traditional understanding of a team’s (and the world’s) codes of conduct and values we build together in relationships and groups.
Gabriel: Yes, in conventional team sports we typically play within fixed teams and rules that don’t change. But in my games I’m particularly interested in rethinking the notion of what a team is. What defines a group? How can we create a more fluid, complex and inclusive understanding of teams? Multiform constantly deconstructs and reconstructs teams, challenging fixed categories.
I position all the games I develop as a form of queer pedagogy. They teach us to navigate the world beyond binary structures, reintroducing complexity into team sports and values. They also question the idea of stable categories and behaviours, inviting players to experience fluidity in both gameplay and identity.

Nadine: What is the significance of belonging when these relationships and identities become fluid?
Gabriel: Actually, one of the games I developed, Anonymous Allyship (2019), sparks deep discussions about belong-ing. In the game, players don’t wear uniforms and don’t know who is on their team. Each player is only given the number of goals they must defend. They can score in any of the other two goals, but they must figure out their teammates through observation alone.
At first, this uncertainty makes players hesitant. But as the game progresses, they start recognising patterns – who is defending the same goal, who they can trust. Players often say it’s easier to figure out who isn’t on their team than who is.
The game makes the abstract notion of belonging tangible, showing how our sense of belonging impacts our feelings as an individual and as a group, and this leads to different behaviour, and even emotional security. The moment players identify their teammates, their confidence shifts – they feel safer, more motivated, more connected – because it can be intimidating when you’re just alone on the field and don’t really know who to pass the ball to.

Nadine: It feels like your games also mirror your own role as a designer – navigating different contexts or sports fields, and collaborations or teams.
Gabriel: My work is about collaboration, as well as relying on collaboration as central to its realisation. I’ve never believed in the myth of the solitary creative genius. Creativity is relational – it’s born out of dialogue, tension and shared effort. My creative pro-jects emerge from relations and collaborations with institutions, com-munities and participants. The process itself mirrors many of the dynamics of the game: how do we work together when we have different goals and perspectives?

Nadine: I’m so curious to see just how this collaboration between institutions, communities and participants is going to transpire in your transformation of the Dutch Pavillion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale!
Gabriel: Oh, I am so excited to transform the Dutch Pavilion into a queered sports bar! The whole invitation itself has been a fascinating opportunity to think about architecture not just in a physical sense but as a metaphorical social structure – one that holds society together in various ways. In this context, even sport itself can be seen as an architectural system, composed of designated spaces like playing fields, and a design system encompassing objects such as balls, equipment and uniforms. This system not only dictates how we interact during the game but also influences how spectators perceive and understand one another.
Reflecting on these spectators, and their physical and social spaces, led me to the sports bar. Sports bars often foster a sense of unity and belonging for people from different backgrounds by creating a space to cheer – but this unity is always in opposition to another group. Sports bars are also traditionally male-dominated spaces.
So, through this project, together with curator Amanda Pinatih, I’m exploring what it would mean to queer these environments. What does it mean to cheer? Who are we cheering for as a society? When we watch a game, what are we really watching? Which bodies are being represented, and what messages do they convey? What kind of narrative is unfolding in front of us?

Nadine: Is there a gendered aspect to cheering too? I think here of the research you are initiating with Villa Albertine, for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, on cheerleading.
Gabriel: Cheerleading embodies a deeply patriarchal vision of the body, particularly women’s bodies. What’s interesting is that while it is a predominantly American phenomenon, its imagery circulates globally through pop culture, shaping perceptions of gender, bodies and sexuality far beyond the US. For me, cheerleading serves as a compelling case study – not only in how it originated within the US but also in how it has become a symbol of ‘Americanness.’ Nonetheless, at its core, it is both a social and political dance, but what values it promotes can come under scrutiny. For instance, in recent years, it has begun to be reclaimed and reimagined by queer communities as a practice of emancipation.

Nadine: Does this emancipation and queering that your work brings to sport and play also extend to the institutions in which you set up these playgrounds?
Gabriel: I love to use exhibitions to create immersive environments that in turn transform galleries into social spaces for people to meet, interact and play. For my 2022 exhibition ‘Turning Towards Fluidity – A Tournament of the Unknown,’ at W139 in Amsterdam, I turned the gallery into a giant gym – complete with a playing field, locker room, sports shop and cool-down discussion area.
When a group of kids visited, we asked them where they thought they were. They thought the space was either a church or a store. When they learned it was an art gallery, they were frustrated because they assumed it meant they weren’t allowed to run or scream. Their reaction really brought home to me how these games don’t just challenge norms within sports, they challenge the expectations of the spaces themselves.

Nadine: Does this then also eroticise these spaces?
Gabriel: Yes, the erotic emerges in the tensions created by the games and the spaces. I love watching how a group of strangers starts off feeling awkward and reserved, then – after just a few minutes of throwing a ball – becomes more spontaneous and uninhibited. You can even hear the shift: at first, people communicate by whispering loudly to each other, but as the game unfolds they start talking, and then shouting. This escalation is an expression of both tension and warming up to the experience.

Nadine: Do some of your games also explore this aural aspect?
Gabriel: Yes, the voice is a fascinating element in both sport and play. It’s used to communicate, as well as to assert power, and express emotions and vulnerability. In my games, I sometimes ask players to use their voices in unconventional ways – calling out to each other in playful tones or using specific sounds to create new rhythms. This disrupts traditional hier-archies of sport, where the loudest or most commanding voice often dominates, and instead opens up space for experimentation and collective rhythm-making.

Nadine: Your own voice must still play a significant role though. How do you relate to your voice?
Gabriel: My relationship with my voice has evolved through my work. I see it as both a tool and a presence – a way to guide, invite and connect. Voice, like play, is an act of seduction – not in a manipulative sense, but as a means of drawing people into a shared experience and fostering intimacy.

Nadine: You do have quite the role of a seducer in your practice, provoking people into questioning their societal boxes – through the seemingly innocent and fun medium of sport. Do you ever meet with resistance?
Gabriel: Sometimes it takes some convincing. A few years ago, while teaching at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, my colleagues and I started the academic year with a queer sports workshop in a gym. We were surprised by the number of complaints from students who said they didn’t want to participate because they had come to art school to avoid sports. Their resistance made us realise just how deeply ingrained these associations are – sport as something rigid, exclu-sionary and even traumatising forsome. I see my role as a designer to entice and seduce people into parti-cipation while also creating a safe, welcoming space.

…Design, especially in an immaterial sense, is about creating an invitation. It draws people in through colour, texture, movement and interaction, sparking curiosity and engagement…

Nadine: Now, your work is part of MoMA’s ‘Pirouette: Turning Points in Design’ exhibition because of its impact on rethinking team spirit and relationships. It’s fascinating to consider how, in our lifetimes, design has expanded to include immaterial aspects – dynamics between bodies, spaces and relationships. What are design’s tools of seduction when it becomes less material?
Gabriel: Design, especially in an immaterial sense, is about creating an invitation. It draws people in through colour, texture, movement and interaction, sparking curiosity and engagement. Sport is inherently seductive – it’s charged with anticipation, energy, and the thrill of risk and reward. The choreography of a team in motion, the intimate vulnerability of competition – these elements pull people in.
In my work, seduction is about invitation and participation. It’s about designing systems that subtly shift dynamics, like passing a ball to an opposing team member in Multiform, prompting players to reconsider relationships and hierarchies.
My work is an invitation into a shared experience in which we can explore relating to each other in a more playful, fluid and enriching way than the binaries that have been imposed on us. Because, in the end, the most seductive game is the one where we rewrite the rules together.