The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art

On the fringe of sports culture are the Ultras, the European football fans whose pyrotechnics, chants, wildly creative stunts, and hooliganism are infamous. Using selections from his archive containing over 25,000 photographs of Ultras' street art and graffiti, including everything from elaborate murals to stickers to "scratchitto" incisions and spray-paint duels, award-winning author and researcher Mitja Velikonja introduces readers to the visual iconography of a fascinating underworld.

The Ultra subculture is built by "no-bodys," the anonymous (primarily) men whose attachments to their teams sometimes cross the lines into nationalist sentiments and militaristic "Blood and Soil" extremism. After examining general themes and trends in street art and tifo club graffiti, Velikonja embarks on a case study of fans from his native Slovenia and touches on the roles of football fans in the Balkan Wars. As he peels back layers of misinformation and misrepresentation, he cues our understanding of factional midsets within histories of political instability and argues for dissensus being a critical element to democracies.

An intriguing visual title as well as a thoughtful meditation on street culture and sports.

Dr. Mitja Velikonja is the author of eight books and a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has recently been a full-time visiting professor in Krakow, St. Petersburg, at Columbia University in New York and Yale University as well as Fulbright visiting researcher in Philadelphia, The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, and NYU.