Ultras Youth Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Ultras Youth is now part of Mufoco collection.

A portfolio of 14 fine art prints by Fineart Lab Napoli has been delivered to the museum.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography had previously presented the group exhibition titled Who doesn’t jump up! Football, Culture, Identity, curated by Matteo Balduzzi. The exhibition treats the game of football as an expression of both individual and group identity. It features the site specific installation Ultras Youth : Movimenti, densità, stratagemmi, posizioni.

It is made of ink-jet prints and vinyl printing (about 40 photographs), two iPad showcasing digital pictures, stickers, one original ultras banner, one stencil, two videos, one audio footage. Additionally, various ultras objects over two walls, two tables and the stained glass window at Museo Fotografia Contemporanea first floor. A site specific production  was  based on a translation of ultras supporters cultures into some documentary points of view: movements, density, archives, ploys, positions. And, of course inherently, youth. With the support of Fondazione Nuovi Mecenati.

Ultras Youth is part fo my documentary based photography works. I usually archive them under the label Argumenta (from Latin arguere, to prove. Opening a wide range of ideas related to the uncertainty of depiction. Archive as score, re-writing, readable/unreadable, fragments, representation as a temporary act, representation as a translation.

Ultras Youth Manifesto

1. Since the willing to depict a phenomenon is just not enough, Ultras Youth is primarily a research based photography collection. The research project is led by historian Sébastien Louis, whose presence defines a stable investigation field, never under the pressure of personal or intimate needs to depict a phenomenon. The alliance of scientific research and aesthetic practices design a wider project whose goal is the understanding of a culture.
2. Ultras Youth is a challenging work in terms of photography positions and in terms of ecology of images: which would be the right image able to investigate topics without putting a colonial and naif gaze ?
3. Ultras Youth offers the opportunity to build up a small as well as a modest and temporary cartography, on the edge of classic iconography, of a youth movement constantly expanding from the Mediterranean area and mutating according to the countries and cities in which it establishes its roots.
4. Ultras movement does not need any kind of monument, being itself a constant producer of monuments. But it might sometimes require the presence of photography as a tool to keep track of events and actions, in order to minimise the emotional waste due to ephemeral performances. 
5. My main interest focuses on operations : aesthetic, ethic and political operations.
6. Assuming that a movement finds its vis existendi in the effort released to be part of the movement itself, to observe the breaking points of orthodoxy is a leading criteria. I am mainly attracted by the ways in which Ultras go out of designed spaces (the curva and its masculine density is, by definition, Ultras primary space), when they put themselves in danger in regard to they own ideology, when they fall into contradiction during the identity definition process.
7. Since the curva is the space assigned for ultras groups staged shows (usually defined by classic terms choreography and scenography), how can we define Ultras’ performativity? 
8. Notes for a taxonomy of Ultras movement: movimenti, migrazioni, stratagemmi, posizioni, archivi. Michel de Certeau arts de faire: to walk, to collect, to show, to hide, to believe.