138 pages Edited by Os Gemeos Photographs by Enrico Salvadori and Fernando Meirelles 27,5 x 27,5 cm Language: English Sewn paperback with exposed coloured threads, in a glossy hardboard slipcase with cut-out windows Publisher: Nike 2005
Made for Nike's Joga Bonito campaign ahead of the 2006 World Cup, this book was handed out at the travelling exhibition where Nike screened Ginga: The Soul of Brasilian Football, the documentary produced by Fernando Meirelles' O2 Filmes. Ginga is the word for the rhythm and art of movement — the untranslatable thing Brazilian football has and nobody else does — and the book is Osgemeos' answer to it: their own drawings and paintings set against photographs of São Paulo walls, pickup football and skateboarding, printed in the saturated yellows and blues that have been their signature since they started painting in 1987.
Half the book is empty on purpose. Groups of blank coloured pages — yellow, pale blue, white — are bound in throughout for the owner to draw on, which makes every surviving copy a different object depending on whether anyone took the invitation. The binding is left deliberately loose, threads exposed. It was never formally published or distributed outside the exhibition; the specialist bookseller who handled a copy found no record of it in OCLC, meaning no library anywhere has catalogued it.
