Diego Armando Maradona Stadium · Naples, Italy · 2026
Diego’s Ziggurat
Diego’s Ziggurat is a sustained investigation of the Diego Armando Maradona Stadium, formerly Stadio San Paolo, in Naples. Developed through repeated approaches to the stadium, exterior walks, restricted views, entry, drawing, memory, and return, the work considers how architecture bears traces of football, devotion, civic identity, mourning, and collective memory.
The project does not attempt to represent Diego Armando Maradona as an icon alone. It attends to the stadium as a material witness to the reciprocal relationship among player, city, supporters, and place. Drawing becomes a form of attention through which the observer enters the site and the site enters the observer.
Field Practice
The stadium is approached at dawn and dusk through a walking practice of acknowledgement and reverence. Inside and outside the structure, the work follows thresholds, lines of sight, circulation, scale, the pitch, the bench, tunnels, supporter areas, and the conditions that determine what may be seen. The drawings are made through direct observation with dry materials, including graphite and compressed charcoal.
Walk. Acknowledge. Wait. Observe. Draw. Return.
