The Chosen Few

The Chosen Few will certainly be attractive to both scholars and a wider international public. Mitja Velikonja’s sophisticated analysis of "Ultra" graffiti and street art draws on a wide range of critical theories from cultural and media studies, visual anthropology, and other disciplines. Using his vast archive of photographs from the past 20 years, he takes readers on a thought-provoking tour of signs, symbols, and images that are often ephemeral but occasionally last for decades. These subversive landscapes are everywhere yet are often invisible to those who do not know how to read them or take no notice in their everyday lives. Velikonja perceptively teases out the small details and hidden meanings of the various forms of football fan graffiti and complements a growing body of research on cultural aspects of sports. The connection between Ultras, graffiti, and collective memory is particularly relevant in the Yugoslav successor states, since football fans often produce murals and other kinds of graffiti dedicated to fallen soldiers, sites of memory, or simply nationalist slogans.
—Dr. Vjeran Pavlaković, Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia and Member, Association for the Study of Nationalities

Velikonja suggests the flexibility of graffiti, showing both their potential to be neutered through domestication and aestheticization, as well as their capacity for serious political subversion.

—Maria Todorova, professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of Imagining the Balkans

When I saw a horde of Euro football fans urinating in the fountain of a Mediterranean town, I was sure that was all they had to say about themselves and the world. Yet, after reading Mitja Velikonja’s book about football fans’ graffiti, we learn that these fan-tribes have something more to express about our present societies. As Velikonja’s archive with hundreds of images shows, these are subcultures from margins of society with a need for public attention, performance and self-expression, whose graffiti and street art has a sketchy yet curiously diverse ideology behind their bizarre spectacles.

—Vjekoslav Perica, author of Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

Mapping the visual – and vicious – struggles between football supporter groups over dominance and territory in urban landscapes of Europe, Velikonja creates a wonderful overview of this ambiguous, inventive and provocative art form, created by and for the people, and concerned with so much more than football: gender and class, local, regional and national loyalties, money, politics and emotions.

—Tea Sindbæk Andersen, author of Usable History? Representations of Yugoslavia’s difficult past from 1945 to 2002

Remarkable DIY designs are featured in Mitja Velikonja's scholarly illustrated book. [...] Velikonja's analyses are an essential addition to any discussion about the connection between football and graffiti, as well as its effect on social affairs in the streets.
—Anthony Ausgang, Artillery