Event information
Gallery F presents AMEN: Grassroots Football, a photographic exhibition by Belgian-born photographer Jessica Hilltout. The project documents football as it is played outside the professional game: on hand-marked pitches, with homemade balls, across cities, villages and remote rural communities.
In 2009, Hilltout travelled approximately 15,000 kilometres through ten African countries, carrying a Hasselblad camera, around 300 rolls of film, a digital camera, a portable printer and a supply of deflated footballs. She photographed players, playing fields, landscapes and, central to the project, the handmade balls themselves, constructed from materials including stockings, plastic bags and string. One such ball, photographed in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, was made by a mother who stuffed it with whatever materials she could find.
The resulting body of work was published as a photographic book, also titled AMEN, produced in collaboration with Hilltout's father, and has since been exhibited internationally. The exhibition at Gallery F brings together photographs of the players and pitches alongside images of the balls collected along the journey, offering an alternative perspective on football's place in everyday African life, distinct from the commercial and broadcast dimensions of the professional game.