DAUGHTERS by Systemarosa: On Reclaiming Football’s Uncounted Stories

There are cultural shifts that arrive quietly, almost imperceptibly. A collective gesture, a game, a gathering, a desire begin to move a few millimetres, and suddenly that movement becomes the beginning of something larger. DAUGHTERS, an exhibition curated by systemarosa, on display till December 7th at Galerie Joseph in Paris, exists in this in-between space: where girls who once loved football from its edges return to witness it from the inside.

Founded by Naomi Accardi and Sam Herzog, systemarosa explores the intersection of football, fashion, and culture. Through art, design, and storytelling, it uncovers the rituals, aesthetics, and histories of the game, creating a space where community, style, and play come alive.

For generations, women’s football has been a geography of absence; limited infrastructures, muted narratives, bodies treated as exceptions rather than protagonists. Yet the history tells a more complex truth.As early as 1920, the Dick, Kerr Ladies were drawing crowds of over 50,000 in England, numbers many men’s teams couldn’t rival, before the FA banned women from its pitches in 1921, a prohibition that lasted half a century and reshaped the sport’s visibility. Across Europe, women kept playing in factory teams, community fields, and unofficial leagues, sustaining a game that institutions refused to recognise. Female fandom followed similar patterns of resilience: in Italy, women formed organised supporter groups in the 1970s; in Brazil, fans fought cultural stigmas that discouraged them from entering stadiums; in the UK, girls traded Panini stickers even when the company refused to print female players until 2011. Women were not absent, they were systematically uncounted.

While institutions hesitated, something else was growing in the undersides of the sport: Sunday leagues, queer collectives, grassroots pitches, WhatsApp groups, fan pages built late at night by those who wanted to see themselves reflected somewhere, anywhere.

These were not always soft places, but they were necessary ones. Here, football became a language of community long before it became a headline.

“DAUGHTERS is the exhibition we always knew we wanted to make. It is personal, emotional, and rooted in lived experience. We grew up as daughters of the game and yet rarely saw ourselves mirrored in its narratives. Football gave us language, belonging, and direction, but it took years to realise that those experiences were worthy of being represented, archived, and celebrated.”

With DAUGHTERS, systemarosa assembles seven artists from across Europe to ask what does it mean to grow up as daughters of a cultural shift in football, not just inheritors, but authors rewriting the game’s language. Each artist enters the conversation from her own doorway, carrying personal histories, diasporas, imaginaries and material languages.

Alina Akbar, British-born, of Pakistani heritage, works across film, photography, and installation to weave cinematic narratives rooted in diasporic memory and working-class realities. In the exhibition she channels the quiet urgency of lives shaped beyond the pitch: her images echo the world of immigrant childhoods, where football often existed as whispered dreams, borrowed balls, backyard games.

Alessandra Francesca Coppola, originally from Italy and shaped by a lifelong love of the game (fandom inherited alongside her father’s devotion to Salernitana and later AS Roma), brings a neorealist gaze to the raw, emotional landscape of football culture. Through handcrafted collage, analogue photography, and manually assembled paper pieces she evokes the rituals, the banners, the textures of fan life.

Clara Borde de Castro (French–Portuguese) presents an evolving archive of unofficial merchandise and bootleg memorabilia.Through her project (CR7 BOOTLEGACY), she transforms these discarded fan objects into alternative histories of devotion.

Emmely Elgersma, sculptor and ceramicist, merges the world of football coaching with material experimentation. Having held a studio at the grounds of a major football stadium and even coached at youth and community clubs, she translates tactical sensibility into sculptural form. In the show, she brings improvised sculptures made from clay, papier- mâché, and found materials.

Emily Bisgaard, from Denmark, operates at the intersection of community engagement and artistic practice. Her work treats football not solely as sport, but as social language, a space of belonging, identity, and collective care. Having co-founded community teams and contributed to organisations focused on inclusion and empowerment, she reflects in her practice how the sport can act as a frame for resilience, solidarity, and creative expression.

Nicole Chui, based in London but rooted in a Hong Kong–Malaysian background, channels the raw, unfiltered energy of grassroots football into embroidery, a medium often associated with delicacy, but here reclaimed as unruly, emotional, and defiant.

Ruth Emma Davis, living and working in Liverpool, offers a gentle reimagining of football’s visual and emotional worlds. Her pastel-toned portraits and soft-focus compositions recast players, supporters, and football ephemera in spaces of intimacy and nostalgia: misty fields, open skies, softened jerseys, quiet gestures.

What the exhibition ultimately offers is a reflection of a generation who is no longer waiting for permission to exist within football’s story, because they have already begun writing their own.

Photos by Eseniia Araslanova & Ophélie Maurus