July 2025, FT Chinese Columnist Fanyu Lin

A young man, once told he would be too small for football, soared over 2.7 meters in the air and never came back down.

That moment exploded into history in Rome on May 27, 2009, during the UEFA Champions League Final. Lionel Messi, just 21, rose above towering defenders and expectations to head the ball into Manchester United’s net. His boot tore free midair, as if his body left behind everything that once held him back. The header sealed Barcelona’s historic treble and marked the emergence of Messi as a living legend.

Leo Messi at the 2009 Champions League Final © FC Barcelona

This story of rising beyond limits, of memory suspended in air, sits at the heart of Living Memory: Messi – A Goal in Life, an artwork co-created by pioneering media artist Refik Anadol and Leo Messi, curated by Ximena Caminos. This July, an immersive exhibition of the work is on view at Christie’s New York, coinciding with an online auction, with proceeds dedicated to charitable causes close to Messi’s heart, including the Inter Miami CF Foundation’s global partnership with UNICEF.

In the latest installment of the Global Leadership Conversation series, I spoke with the artist and the curator in an attempt to uncover the soul of a work that resists simple categorization. It is part philanthropy, part experiment, part commodity. Its power lies in the tensions it refuses to resolve:

What separates a real work of art from a “branded” collaboration?

Is it seeking the highest offer in the guise of the highest offering?

I. A Curatorial Withholding of Consent

When cultural placemaker and curator Ximena Caminos was asked to help auction Leo Messi’s favorite goal for a charity campaign, she elegantly declined.

“It wasn’t art,” she told me. This wasn’t cynicism. It was conviction.

In an era when artists have literally sold pieces of their souls, whether as commentary or provocation, she wanted this project to go further. Not a gesture. Not a metaphor. She wanted a real work of art: something of artistic significance, emotional weight, technical rigor, social resonance, and above all, something the world truly needs.

“I’ve always worked on bringing art to people. This is my expertise,” she said, “I don’t want to be in the business of bringing to the world things that the world doesn’t need. We’re at such a tipping point. Such a fragile moment.” From Buenos Aires to Miami, Ximena has transformed city streets, coastlines, and even underwater reefs into living sites of artistic transformation. She believes art should not merely raise awareness; it must do the work.

She wanted this piece to carry that responsibility.

“There is art that may not make it into art history because it's creating a new form, but it's genuine,” she said. “It comes from a place of truth and a pure need for expression. When art is born of that space of truth and need, it holds a power. Philosopher Walter Benjamin would call it the Aura – the aura of the artwork. When that happens, the art has a power in itself, which makes it art, because it's holding that truth. It's done, of course, with mastery.”

Her first reaction to the proposal was honest and pointed. “I told them I think the idea is beautiful, but maybe this is like football memorabilia. This is not art.” They asked her what it would take to make it art. “My response was that the goal had to be reinterpreted by a really important and brilliant artist.”

That’s when she turned to Refik Anadol.

Living Memory Messi - A Goal in Life (2025) by Refik Anadol in collaboration with Leo Messi © Refik Anadol Studio

“We started a very interesting process of understanding how to transform Leo’s goal into a masterpiece,” she recalled, “into something that is a genre of its own.” The result is not a retrospective. Not a replay. But a kind of inner landscape, where personal memory becomes collective, and individual experience is shared without being diluted.

II. A Memory Made Alive

Refik Anadol has long collaborated with artificial intelligence to turn the invisible into art, translating weather systems into movement, brain scans into brushstrokes, and dreams into architecture. But this time was different.

“It was the first time I worked with a living legend’s memory,” he said. “Messi offered not just the footage or the statistics, but his actual biometric data, his breath, his voice, his vision, his heartbeat, his feeling.” This project brought Refik face to face with a memory embodied, not archived. It was Messi’s most cherished moment of what it felt like to fly.

Refik’s practice is grounded in what he calls “ethical data.” “Our work has a very strong foundation of ethics,” he explained. “In this case, Messi, a legend, I mean, a living legend in the history of sports, gave his best moment in his journey as a form of art. I think this is very poetic. He gave it as a gift, not just to us, but to the world.”

Leo Messi and Refik Anadol © Inter Miami CF Foundation

“For me, the question was: how can it be art? How can it go beyond a beautiful video recording of that moment?” he said. “I believed my role was to take the memory, the interviews, the feelings, the emotions, and transform them into a beautiful experiential sculpture.”

His studio developed sixteen custom AI algorithms trained on Messi’s multisensory data, capturing the goal from the inside out: the tension, the velocity, the silence before impact. What emerged was not a replay, but a world. An immersive, eight-minute digital environment in 16K resolution. A living data sculpture. A temple to feeling.

Living Memory Messi - A Goal in Life (2025) by Refik Anadol in collaboration with Leo Messi © Refik Anadol Studio

“To me, AI is a thinking brush,” Refik said. “AI is actually beyond a tool. It’s a force. If you push it toward good, it can do good. If you blend it with creativity, it becomes a creative force. But it reflects who we are. It’s truly a mirror of humanity.”

That mirror, powerful and never neutral, requires care. “AI can create beauty or bias,” he said. “It can echo greed, or expand humanity.” This awareness forms the ethical scaffolding of the piece. It does not pretend to be untouched by technology’s complications. Instead, it insists on shaping that force consciously.

But is memory still memory when it’s engineered?

For all of Refik’s futurism, his devotion to the materiality of memory stems from something deeply personal: loss. As his uncle’s memory faded from Alzheimer’s, it set him on a journey to hold onto what slips away. “He was very special to me,” Refik said. “I was able to store some of his memories, some of his emotions. That’s super personal to me.”

That grief sparked his earliest investigations into biosensing and emotional data. “I began in 2016, during a very heavy year at UCLA. I worked closely with neuroscientists and dove deeply into brain signals, EEGs, and biometric sensing.”

“In Messi’s project, we open up this whole new world of imagination,” he said. “We became the first studio exploring this medium as an art form. And I still believe we’re just at the beginning. I believe that this form of art will be an inspiring field and continue to expand.”

For him, the work is not an aesthetic exercise. It is an act of love to preserve our shared human pulse.

III. The Highest Offer

In the end, even as Living Memory: Messi – A Goal in Life expands into public consciousness, with all proceeds from the ongoing auction set to benefit the charitable causes it was created to serve, the artwork remains a private offering to be sold to the highest bidder.

That fact isn’t a footnote. It is the very frame. This is not a work that shies away from its own conditions. It embraces them: celebrity, valuation, spectacle, commodification. And in doing so, it invites a harder question. Can something transcendent still emerge from within?

“I think people sometimes only see the shiny pixels in our work,” Refik said. “But there’s more than that. It’s about communication. It’s about understanding. The reason our work captures the attention of millions of people isn’t because of shiny pixels or technology. It’s the human agency inside: the values, the purpose, the power of the story, and the strength of its context. That’s what makes it meaningful, purposeful, impactful.”

What do we choose to preserve?

What do we risk when we turn memory into experience?

What might we find if we allow ourselves to enter another’s moment and feel it as our own?

The leap in Rome remains iconic: a rare header from a player known for his feet; a goal of instinct, timing, and audacity; a goal that suspended Messi literally in the air, and figuratively in football history.

But beneath the historic moment lies something universal. Messi’s rise to global fame is not just a tale of genius. It’s a story of struggle, risk, perseverance, and grace. Born in Rosario, Argentina in 1987, diagnosed with a growth condition at age ten, Messi’s family could not afford treatment. No Argentine club would cover it. Then FC Barcelona took a chance, famously signing him on a napkin and relocating the 13-year-old to Spain. He was small, shy, and quiet. But on the field, he was unstoppable.

After all, that goal was never just a point on a scoreboard. It was a turning point in a life. A risk. A moment of transcendence. Now it is something else again. As we await the highest offer at the charity auction now underway, shouldn’t we cherish the highest offering from Messi himself?

An offering of memory, vulnerability, and hope, given to each of us to remember our own leaps, to hold the feeling of rising higher than anyone thought we could.

Living Memory: Messi – A Goal in Life

The Inward Power of David Zwirner