Ultras Youth

Ultras Youth: A portrait of youth through Ultras football fans culture A journey through the Ultras groups in the cities of Europe, Asia, Mediterranean and Atlantic Africa. A distant proximity to young people sharing the Ultras lifestyle: from the stadium to life in the “polis”. Ultras Youth, since 2015, is a photographic and videographic collection that can be used in exhibitions, publication projects, conferences and meetings and can be divided by cities and countries according to the various Ultras groups. main purpose is to define a generational portrait exploring the way of life and the expression of Ultras movement members, their philosophy, their ways of doing things. Ultras themselves define it, generically, using the word mentality. We try to analyze group dynamics but also to tell individual stories and to highlight what turns out to be a constant political positioning: to define a space and to inhabit it. Therefore, the complexity of the Ultras movement appears to us as an articulated network of ways of doing, ways of being and ways of believing. Our work is based on a collaboration between documentary photography and research, and our aim is to write a cartography of young people operating and living in the world of radical supporting. To make an inventory of states and locations. To give a voice, through images, to a youth movement that takes hold both in large towns and in small towns. Through the collection of photos, videos, objects, sounds, interviews and testimonies, I try to build up an interdisciplinary documentary: art and research, history and sociology. Documentary photography, supported by historical and sociological research, is intended as mediation and not as an illustration or storytelling. Ultras Youth does not arise from an intimate need as a photographer and artist, but it is developed as a project of understanding a culture. Photography is not simply involved in a process of visual representation but it tries to participate into a correct flow of migration of forms. From fragments of reality to images, from reality to codification in artworks taking into account the researcher’s analysis, revealing traces of the dynamics of field research and interrogating the genres of photography and their ability to sow narrative or truth.