Bosfights | Live Free (2016-2019)
The dark horse of this year’s open call is Sebastian Steveniers. His project focuses on hooligans, who have largely disappeared from football stadiums, but have now found a new territory: Europe’s remote woods. There, teams fight each other according to strict rules, under the condition of absolute secrecy. Three years ago, Sebastian Steveniers decided to attempt to gain access to their hermetically sealed world. The doors opened hesitantly for him, but his investigation took an unexpected turn. He was arrested in 2018 and detained for three weeks on suspicion of involvement in the movement. The thousands of images he made were confiscated and have still not been returned. Steveniers has managed to recover about forty of the images from sent Whatsapp, Messenger and Telegram messages, most of them poor quality. He has also collected newspaper articles, interrogation reports, police and witness statements, the diary he kept in prison and screenshots of smartphone films showing him as a photographer between the warring parties.
After a career as a professional basketball player, Sebastian Steveniers decided to become a photographer at a relatively late age. He is a photojournalist at De Standaard and works on long-term documentary projects. Gravitating to groups and subjects outside of the mainstream, he uses his camera to gain access to closed worlds, attempting to record them as objectively as possible. This is also how he approached his project ‘Bosfights / Live Free’. However, against his will he himself has become part of his work.
Some faces have been made unrecognisable for legal reasons.
