Autumn in Europe brings its own particular joys, and one of them is indubitably the start of the football season: some of the most iconic sporting organisations anywhere in the world getting into the rhythm of alternate domestic and continental action proffers a sense of metaphysical order which is arguably surpassed only by the leaves falling from the trees.
It is around this time of year – once the campaign has begun, the qualification phases of the UEFA competitions have been concluded and the transfer windows firmly closed – that soccer magazines of record such as France Football and Kicker publish their special season preview issues. Given that this company’s Creative Director & CSO (‘CD&CSO’) is an eternal football journalist, the browsing of these publications – schedule permitting – constitutes a reassuringly Proustian experience.
This first post-Brexit year, however, was different. Attempting to procure his annual statistical binge, our CD&CSO first headed to what is probably the most pre-eminent independent newsagent in the country – Rococo News and Magazines in trendy Notting Hill, not a million miles from this company’s corporate offices on Kensington High Street – and was told that they had not had France Football or kicker in stock since the start of COVID-19. When he pointed out that lockdown had long ended, a giant penny crashed down; furtive on-site database enquiries revealed a distinct level of non-availability.
The company’s CD&CSO then reasoned that London Waterloo – with not one, but two branches of popular media retail giant WH Smith – was probably a better bet. In the first shop, the only ‘foreign’ publication was an Arabic newspaper (Asharq Al-Awsat, lit. ‘The Middle East’) which is headquartered in London. An fresh-faced assistant from this branch was so incredulous that nothing else was available in the international section that he personally walked our representative across to the second store, where his more senior colleague informed him that they do not stock overseas print media, an assertion that was clearly news to the visibly-taken-aback young worker.
Our protagonist’s story ends at the flagship WH Smith located on the main concourse at London Victoria, and which is captured in the short film accompanying this blog post: Pig Society, shot on location, pans across from the suddenly ubiquitous ‘diet coup’ Union Jacks hanging from the rooves of the nineteenth-century terminus building to the now completely barren international media section.
The symbolism of this video art could scarcely be clearer: a manufactured and profoundly insecure nationalism giving birth to a peerless cultural and material emptiness. However, there is an even more urgent dimension to this work than mere metaphor. With shortages of key items becoming just a tad unnerving and already-stretched supply chains in danger of beginning to snap, the shadowy and surreal establishment jape that is Brexit is yielding a new and yet stranger chapter.
Mediolana 