Geisterspiel

The people depicted were dressed as a kind of footballers from various clubs with corresponding jerseys: Atalanta Bergamo, Real Madrid, New York City, Wuhan FC, Paris Saint Germain, Liberia national team, Brazil national team and Arsenal London. The mourners become allegories, a projection surface for the Ebola epidemic AND the hotspots of the Covid-19 pandemic, by wearing the football jersey of the corresponding geographically affected region. At the same time, many Africans dream of a football career to escape poverty. Three corpse bearers symbolize 3 continents: Wuhan (Asia), Monrovia (Africa), Bergamo (Europe). The body bag and the flying fox have the same color and texture, so they symbolize something like a sad alpha and omega. The red beaks refer to the plague in Venice in the late Middle Ages, thus creating a historical reference to the topic of epidemics. The red soccer field shows the playing field as a restricted area for sports and games during the pandemic. The football field is usually surrounded by advertising, here a haiku provides comfort with a song of the singing nightingale for the healthy and the sick; for the dead that they arrive safely in the realm of the dead. The annual fleabane, as the corner flag on the far left, spreads uncontrollably in nature, like the virus in humans. A ball flies across the night sky even though there is no game taking place. The “Masked Ball” shows that Covid-19, above all, is a global event.