SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink TogethernessSIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness

How can architecture resist exclusionary social norms? And how can the way we design spaces encourage different ways of living and being together? SIDELINED explores these questions through the lens of sport, a phenomenon that both reflects and shapes the social dynamics of our society. While stadiums, sports fields and sports bars can foster unity and group identity, they can also lead to division and exclusion.

In SIDELINED, visitors enter an alternative sports bar built on the principles of fluidity, connection, togetherness and experimentation. At its heart is the work of social designer Gabriel Fontana, whose alternative team sports reflect on the social dynamics that shape our shared public spaces — and how those spaces influence us and our behaviour. By breaking open traditional norms and rigid social structures, and embracing diversity, empathy and solidarity, SIDELINED rewrites the rules of the game.

While SIDELINED is on display, you will be able to try out the alternative sports developed by Gabriel Fontana with your friends, your sports team, your school class, or others. More information will follow soon.

Inside the bar, you can watch three team sports by Gabriel Fontana: Multiform, Anonymous Allyship and Fluid Field. With transformable uniforms, unknown teams and shapeshifting playing fields, these reimagined sports allow us to experience novel forms of connection, free from predefined roles and structures. Through the seemingly simple alteration of the rules, these games reinvent sports as a form of queer pedagogy by challenging the boundaries of competition, collaboration and orientation.

The bar also features a Fluid Foosball Table: a reconfiguration of the beloved bar game, in which rigid binary structures are replaced by a fluid playing field with no fixed teams. SIDELINED also showcases football shirts (worn during the Anonymous Allyship video shoot in Venice); a sports newspaper containing essays and conversations with sports bar owners, Queer Gym Rotterdam founders, architects and writers; a sound work by Luca Soudant based on recordings from Trans* Pride Berlin 2022; and a silent film montage by Alice Wong on sport as a site of political resistance and transformation.

A well-stocked trophy cabinet displays trophies reflecting Fontana’s team sports, with prizes awarded for various roles based on collaboration, improvisation and care. The question is not whether you win, but how you choose to play.

SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness was previously on display at the Dutch Pavilion during the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025, as the official Dutch contribution. Nieuwe Instituut commissioned the entry.

The scenography and graphic design are by Koos Breen and Jeannette Slütter.