Gianni Infantino and performance theatre…of otherness

Photo by Rhett Lewis on Unsplash

Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, is no philosopher. He’s a lawyer, a career sports administrator, a Swiss-Italian man with a shiny pate and a face as smooth and creamy as a baby’s bottom. A Caucasian baby’s bottom.

So the context of Mr Infantino’s extraordinary hour-long address to journalists in Doha, 24 hours before the 2022 World Cup kick-off, needs to be clear.

The monologue — half-lament, half-criticism, partly angry, partly meditative — could have qualified as a one-person multimedia play, a piece of theatre that pushes the boundaries in a daring and unpredictable way. It was reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance art, ‘Cut Piece’, in which the Japanese artist knelt on an empty stage with a pair of scissors in front of her and encouraged members of the audience to come on stage one by one and cut off any piece of her clothing. Like Yoko Ono, Mr Infantino offered up himself to be savaged. “You want to criticise,…