“The football I envisioned fills a single round shape with everything a crowd is. Up close it is not one ball but a thousand little scenes. People meeting, fighting, celebrating, hiding, falling in love, falling over. Some of it is about football. A lot of it is about our world today, which is to say, about us.

I grew up in a commune in the nineteen-seventies, at a kitchen table shared by theatre people, beekeepers and endless arguments about politics and philosophy. Before I made art I made hip hop beats, building tracks out of small fragments stacked on top of each other. This ball works the same way. Many small parts, sampled from life, pressed into one shape. From a distance it reads as a beehive or an anthill. Step closer and it breaks apart into individual lives, scenes and situations.

This is a public piece, which matters to me. I tried to make something generous. Not a statement to walk past, but a thing to walk around, lean into, come back to. A game inside the game. There is room for everyone in there. The fan and the loner, the hero and the person selling water outside the stadium. The World Cup gathers the world into one place. I put a version of that world onto one ball and left it open, so whoever finds it keeps looking long after the final whistle.”