How sport can help to cope with societal change (France/Netherlands)
Evolution Gender Design Award iphiGenia 2025
Queer people are born into a world whose rules were not made for them. As a result, they are often pushed to the sidelines, cast as outsiders, and forced either to adapt – or to reinvent the game from the outside.
That is precisely what Gabriel Fontana does. From the perspective of an outsider, he radically rethinks sport as a social playing field, drawing on strategies of gender design. Based on a social design concept, his work aims to support societal transformation. His alternative team sports create spaces in which belonging is renegotiated.
At the interface of design, education, and choreography, Gabriel develops formats that subvert traditional logics of competition and transform them into collaborative, inclusive practices. These new rules of play deconstruct group dynamics and foster empathy. In a time of deep division, Gabriel’s strength lies in his ability to implement design to shape the way we interact with one another.
The goal of his work is to convey to people, in a playful way, the true significance of prevailing norms of identity, community, and inclusion – and how we might effect change. He uses sport as a powerful metaphor for society, in which “playing together” is, ideally, the norm.
The iphiGenia Evolution Award honours Gabriel Fontana’s accomplished and internationally recognized work for employing social entities such as inclusion, empathy, community, and exercise as design tools in order to open up new forms of social interaction and inclusive coexistence. Collaborations with Nike, the Paris Olympic Games, and MoMA New York – as well as the growing interest in his team sports among schools across Europe – demonstrate how targeted redesign can make sport an effective medium for diversity, equality, and interconnectedness.
