DoppelHouse is proud to announce our newest title, The Chosen Few: Aesthetics and Ideology in Football Fan Graffiti and Street Art by Mitja Velikonja is now available! Velikonja’s visual title combines his personal archive of hundreds of street art photos with anecdotes about the ultras, the European football fans whose pyrotechnics, chants, wildly creative stunts, and hooliganism are infamous.

Just a game? This intriguing visual title looks deep into the underbelly of football (soccer) fandom, featuring a vast photographic archive of fans’ graffiti and street art captured by a pioneering ‘graffitologist’. At the intersection of the street and sport we find themes of the day: how racial, ethnic, and class tensions play out in visual culture.

Find Velikonja’s book on our site, at your local independent bookstore, or on Amazon!

PRAISE

One of the most creative, inventive and amusing ‘readers’ of contemporary Central European and Balkan ideological constellations. Velikonja invented a new science: “graffitology.”
– Dubravka Ugrešić, author of The Culture of Lies and The Ministry of Pain

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 and cultural historian, University of Copenhagen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mitja Velikonja is the author and coauthor of eight books. He is a Professor for Cultural Studies and head of Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and has recently been a full-time visiting professor in Krakow, St. Petersburg, Rijeka, 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.