Chiara Calgaro, Changing Room, 2025

Changing Room explores the issue of gender identity through one of the world’s most influential cultural phenomena: football.
Chiara Calgaro begins her photographic journey with the team she plays for – a self-managed and self-financed collective of women*, trans and non-binary people – and continues with a trip across Europe in search of other queer teams.

With their faces often obscured, the athletes’ bodies bend, contort and perform in front of the camera, just as each individual “acts” throughout their lives in ways that are supposed to correspond to the gender assigned to them at birth.
Through the staging of “parodic gestures”, the artist suggests the possibility of reimagining gender identity within a more nuanced and complex narrative that permeates social spaces, starting with the dimension of play.

The football team’s changing room becomes a microcosm in which to experiment with practices that challenge those dominant in society, suggesting new forms of collectivity and participation and using the world’s most popular sport as a tool for self-determination.