This time, we’re fascinated by the global cult of bodies. How certain ones are praised and lavishly paid for the special way they move. How the muscles play in a perfect unison to blow the competition and the jury away by creating elaborate movements or reaching a line on the ground faster than other bodies. Sports and athletics used to be a way of survival even for us human animals, now it’s just burning precious energy as a showcase, releasing some serotonin and a means to get some serious coin. Until you retire or hurt your meat vessel. In the following 3-month theme, we’ll introduce you to multiple angles of this fascinating human activity and the mentality, competitiveness, structures and lore that surrounds it. Not only on the professional athlete level but in our everyday lives we apply sportshumanship, we compare, we race, we tear down, we enhance. The body might sit still more often but the mind never ceases to run.
Don’t let anyone take the wind out of your sails. You can’t afford to be tired, get your defences down, lose focus, otherwise they’ll get you! Are we still talking about sports and not our mortal existence in general?
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Watch out, we’re serving a Plymouth Poet Laureate who will weave words about sport fandoms’ tribalism and living vicariously through others whose bodies function in a certain way. In an essay accompanied by custom illustrations, we’ll go on a run through virtual worlds, then we’ll experience drawings and AR posters inspired by Space Jam and the basketball culture of the 90s, and a series of illustrations dedicated to running as the ultimate unifying sport.
Next we have pulsating bright illustrations with a sporty feel, incomprehensible video about cyborgs in real and virtual space in the 60s, fineliner illustrations of the casual tuning community, and those depicting graphic dynamism and erotica.
May we offer motocross helmets painted as if they belonged to chivalrous knights? The red-light district women as athletes, daughters, friends? Sports in the heart of the invisible beholder in photographs? How about our run into the post-COVID-19 future with four dystopian scenarios? Paintings that smell of petrol, beer, tyres and burning cakes?
Watercolour pieces in perfectly imperfect movement, sex and masturbation as a healthy team work discipline, not a race, avangarde sustainable sportswear brand, a triatlonist crafting her own sports-inspired collection, jewellery makers challenging established game rules of the trade and – of course – our very own fashion editorial, going by the name Passively Active.
Lets have look at fantasy world
Choose your alter ego
choose the look
and
play the game.
BIO/ The author of the FRONT RUNNER cover art is artist Mikuláš Suchý, a fourth-year student of animation at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, the Czech Republic. He’s focused on hand-drawn animation. As he noted, he used to draw pictures but then, in the last three years, he stopped liking that they are not moving. He might come back to plain drawing, though, as he also enjoys telling stories this way as a comics lover. He likes to depict stereotypes, horror themes and something akin to history. Lately, he became interested in the 19th century so there’s that…
CREDITS
Article / Františka Blažková
Animation / Mikuláš Suchý
