FC TECTONICS:
Football’s Strategic Play in the Territorialisation of Nation-State Sovereignty

Multi-media installation
Length: ‘12
Date: 2025
Link: https://vimeo.com/1096652495

MA GEO-Design Graduation work, Design Academy Eindhoven. Exhibited at Dutch Design Week 2025.

FC TECTONICS is a research-based two-channel video installation that explores how the geopolitical infrastructure of football produces and legitimises territorial boundaries.
Developed through a critical spatial practice, the work approaches football not as a sport but as a technology of governance that regulates sovereignty through negotiations of space.

FIFA counts 211 member associations—eighteen more than the UN. This discrepancy exposes the contested nature of legitimacy itself: who counts as a nation, and through which frameworks?

Operating as a non-state actor, FIFA mirrors but also exceeds diplomatic structures, selectively granting or denying recognition. In doing so, it creates extraterritorial spaces that compel state compliance while remaining outside state control.
By reframing football as a field of power, FC TECTONICS reveals how national legitimacy is continuously contested, redrawn, and negotiated.

FC TECTONICS: Football’s Strategic Play in the Territorialisation of Nation-State Sovereignty

FC TECTONICS:
Football’s Strategic Play in the Territorialisation of Nation-State Sovereignty