ROME — A new exhibition opening in Rome this month poses a question that challenges what Italian society understands as traditional masculinity: why can men embrace, weep, and console one another on a football pitch in ways that no other social setting quite sanctions?
The Sports Archive, on view at Sala Nova from May 14 to July 2 2026, is the latest chapter in an ongoing project by Gianna Dispenza called The Sports Section. Working from an evolving personal archive of images documenting moments across various sports, Dispenza has organised her source material into categories, ‘holding’, ‘crying’, ‘comforting’, ‘dancing’, ‘kissing’, that function as a visual taxonomy of repeated gesture and emotional release within the structured arena of sport.
The works on paper presented at Sala Nova are drawn from this archive. They do not document specific moments so much as trace the repetition of a gesture across dozens of different contexts. The same gesture, repeated, stripped of the identifying markers that would locate it in any particular game or stadium.
For Andrea Festa, the gallery owner and director, the exhibition’s significance lies partly in its timing and location. He describes the show as bringing a subtle but urgent reflection on the visual codes of contemporary masculinity into the Italian context – a conversation, he suggests, that is overdue.
“Using images drawn from sport-contexts, Dispenza isolates gestures of intimacy, vulnerability, and contact,” Festa said, “revealing how certain emotional behaviours are culturally permitted only within specific social frames.”
What remains when context is removed
That removal is the exhibition’s central operation. In their original settings, the gestures Dispenza documents are socially sanctioned. An athlete weeping after a defeat or two players locked in an embrace are game. Dispenza’s works deliberately reduce or eliminate the contextual markers that produce that reading. What is left, once the stadium and the scoreboard are gone, are figures mid-embrace, mid-tears, mid-comfort. The gestures that can no longer hide their intimacy behind the ruse of sportsmanship.
The question the work raises is precise: does meaning reside in a gesture itself, or in the conditions that surround it? By isolating the figures from the environments that validate their behaviour, Dispenza invites a reconsideration of how norms around masculinity, intimacy, and emotional expression survive.
The artist
Dispenza was born in 1990 in Washington State and lives and works in London. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received the Isaac M. Walter Sculpture Prize. Her work has been shown extensively in New York, London, Zurich, and Turin, and she has exhibited in Italy on multiple occasions — at Galleria Ramo in Como, at Artissima in 2025, and now at Andrea Festa’s gallery in Rome. The Sports Archive is her most substantial Italian presentation to date.
