In football many things are forgotten or lost.
Be it stadia, terracing, playing kit or motifs the pace of change can be brutal both from a human and structural perspective. Many facets of a clubs history are often lost to the passage of time; due to player turnover or thanks to club branding or marketing change.
While change in football can be rapid ignorance of the past can never be something that is thrown at football fans especially when it comes to their own club. A sense of collective passion encompasses a knowledge for the now and well as the historic past.
Many supporters these days, do, however, face challenges in attempting to hold onto history. The biggest clubs have turned stadia into flat, barren corporate zones where even the simple souvenir of a paper ticket can be hard to attain and retain.
Graffiti or wall art, for some, can often be seen as a wanton act of destruction even by those within the club. For each person who sees it as something so valuable there will be those who decry its presence.
Murals as a form of self-expression has been around since the invention of writing. In football its absence can be sign of a lack of permission or patronage but its presence can be the sign of club where fans and the owners work together.
For fans the motivations behind the best art can range from boredom, a sense of self-expression, prestige and fame to the worst which can often be a sign of defiance in club authority, a hostility to owners or anger at things that have gone wrong.
Graffiti in general, as artistic expression, tends to only represent a tiny percentage, but in football fandom it generally represents the whole. It often marks the boundaries of claimed jurisdiction or “territory” (turf) and furthers a sense of time and place whether using words or image.
In Odense, located on the Danish Island of………….
To be continued…