The Neighbourhood's Player Cards. A residency with Andrei Becheru

Andrei Becheru — photographer, editor and co-founder of the FOC collective, based in Bucharest — was no stranger to Fabric. In 2022 he had devised the concept of the first issue of "Voices of Fabric", during an artistic residency within the project "Made in Fabric — An Impulse in the Community". Returning to the district, he set out to photograph the third edition of the Football in Traian championship not as a sporting event, but as a collective portrait.

The result is over 120 portraits of participants, photographed at the edge of the pitch in Piața Traian and gathered into a document-album of the district — tangible and alive — accompanied by a set of cards, one for each player. The format is borrowed from childhood football-card collections: small objects that pass from hand to hand and then stay in people's homes.

"What interests me is preserving a public event that is vital to living together, thought up by residents for the residents of Fabric," the photographer writes. In his reading, this is a district that is often pushed to the margins, already on the sharp edge of a gentrification with no real interest in the needs of those who already live there — whether for generations or only recently. A series of portraits then becomes a way of giving the district its own image back.