Stanislas Sauvage
Projects:
The Photographer’s Anxiety at the Shutter Release
Digital Mob Football
Flag
The Constructed Condition
DEBURAU
Commissions
About
Digital Mob Football explores the transformation of football from a working class game into a global spectacle shaped by capital and broadcast culture.
Developed from the perspective of a committed football fan, the project reflects a growing dissonance between the sport’s origins and its contemporary reality. What was once an accessible and communal activity has become increasingly mediated, commercialised, and financially exclusionary. The work emerges from this tension, expressing both devotion to the game and frustration with the systems that now define it.
The title refers to the medieval form of football in England, a chaotic and violent pastime played by the lower classes, grounding the project in a longer history of collective intensity, physical confrontation, and social identity.
At the core of the project are football shirts, treated as cultural artefacts loaded with memory, allegiance, and symbolism. Using scanography, these garments are digitised and physically disrupted during the scanning process, producing images that both preserve and fracture their original identity. These scans are then reworked into dense photomontages, where textures, colours, and patterns collide to evoke the visual and emotional intensity of rivalry.
Sections of the images are further altered through code manipulation, embedding historical match data directly into the file structure and generating moments of digital distortion. This process binds the visual surface of the work to the statistical and historical weight of the rivalries it represents, merging material, digital, and archival layers into a single image.
The final works are presented as large scale PVC banners, a format that draws directly from the visual language of stadiums, advertising, and fan displays. Their scale amplifies the intensity of the images, allowing the fragmented textures and collisions of colour to fully occupy the viewer’s field of vision. Rather than being encountered as contained photographic prints, the works assert themselves as physical presences, echoing the overwhelming nature of live football spectacle. Alongside these banners, individual shirt scans are presented as quieter but equally significant elements, foregrounding the material origin of the work and the tactile qualities of the garments themselves.
Through this interplay of scale, material, and distortion, Digital Mob Football stages a confrontation between passion and commodification, asking what remains of the sport when its cultural foundations are overshadowed by spectacle and profit
Unit 2 Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea
PSG AVL (left) and ARS TOT (right)
Digital prints on 550gsm PVC banner, 1190 × 1680 mm
Picnic, St Leonards-on-Sea
Picnic, St Leonards-on-Sea
ARS TOT (left) and FRA GER (right)
Digital prints on 550gsm PVC banner, 1190 × 1680 mm
Truman Brewery, London
BVB PSG (left) and PSG AVL (right)
Digital prints on 550gsm PVC banner, 1190 × 1680 mm
Truman Brewery, London
FRA GER (left) and ARS TOT (right)
Digital prints on 550gsm PVC banner, 1190 × 1680 mm
Picninc, St Leonards-on-Sea
Grid of 30 archival giclée prints, individual shirt scans, 210 × 297 mm
Digital photomontage from football shirts, with code manipulation
Digital print on 550gsm PVC banner, 119 × 168 cm
Digital photomontage from football shirts, with code manipulation
Digital print on 550gsm PVC banner, 119 × 168 cm
Digital photomontage from football shirts, with code manipulation
Digital print on 550gsm PVC banner, 119 × 168 cm
Digital photomontage from football shirts, with code manipulation
Digital print on 550gsm PVC banner, 119 × 168 cm
Digital photomontage from football shirts
Digital print on 550gsm PVC banner, 119 × 168 cm