There are objects that are part of our everyday life, but of which we do not know the history or origins. One of these is definitely the basketball hoop.
We see it in viral videos in which NBA players hang from it, we see it in the fields around the house, we see it in TV commercials of sports brands, the most passionate can see it even in the trash can (raise your hand if at least once you did not feel Steph Curry hitting the basket with a rolled up piece of paper). 

In short, we see it everywhere, yet we know so little about this object. 

It is from this curiosity that the project “The Hoops” by Yongwook Seong, an artist and visual designer based in Banff, Canada, was born. 

When James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, players had to throw the ball into two fishing baskets hanging from opposite sides of a gymnasium. Initially, the lack of rules led to players kicking and punching their way around the court, which led Naismith to develop a rulebook. 

During the years of the Second World War, thanks to Naismith and the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) to which he belonged, basketball in America had an exponential growth, transforming itself from a regional sport to a national sport. 

“The Hoops” starts precisely from the object of the basket and reinvents and revisits it in both form and context. In this way, Yongwook Seong has created a series of graphics in which different hoops of unusual design are placed in unusual environments such as in the middle of the desert, the ocean or on a beach. 

“The Hoops” is to retrace the genealogy of basketball, and explore alternative designs that would have been missed out during the war time. The designer ironically places each redesigned hoop in a natural surrounding, therefore experimenting an “anomaly” and unravelling its alternative stories.”

Leggi anche: “Kintsugi Court”, il campo in oro riqualificato da Victor Solomon