There are places where football stops being a game and becomes something elemental, a form of survival, a map of identity, a pulse that passes from generation to generation. NO FAIR PLAY, the new exhibition at 2LAB in Catania, steps directly into that current.
Bringing together three archives from three cities with three radically different histories, the show looks beyond the pitch and into the lives of those who animate it. From the drenched terraces of England to the volcanic streets of Naples and the fiercely territorial world of Catania’s ultras, this is football as lived experience, ritual, defiance, and belonging.
The result is not an exhibition about football, but about the people who breathe life into it, and the images that become their living memory.
Lower Block: The British Game in Black & White Grit
Founded by Matt Lidbury, Lower Block is less an archive than a time machine. Its photographs and fanzines capture the raw, unvarnished feeling of British football culture — the walk to the ground, the smoke on the concourse, the cold chip-shop light after a night game.
It documents what the British game often hides: the devotion of away days, the humour in the chaos, the communities stitched together by shared ritual. Lower Block shows the terraces as theatres of identity — places where locality, class, and culture collide.
In NO FAIR PLAY, their presence becomes a grounding point, a reminder that the emotional intensity of fandom doesn’t begin in the stadium. It begins in the street.
Boogie’s Naples: Euphoria on the Edge of the Volcano
When Napoli won the Scudetto in 2023, the city didn’t celebrate — it erupted. And few photographers on earth could have captured that eruption better than Boogie, whose career has taken him from Belgrade’s underbelly to New York’s streets and Kingston’s tension-soaked corners.
Boogie shoots the world with unfiltered honesty. His images of Naples are alive with the electricity of a city experiencing itself fully: joy, defiance, identity, and release. Bodies climb lampposts, flags swallow entire streets, strangers become family for a night.
In NO FAIR PLAY, Boogie’s work becomes a portrait of a city in collective confession — its history, struggle and pride exploding in blue.
Emiliano Zingale: Catania, Territory, and the Architecture of Belonging
For Emiliano Zingale, Catania’s ultras are not subjects — they are a living ecosystem. His long-term project, Ultras Catania studies how identity forms inside a community that exists in constant negotiation with the world around it.
Supporters are shown not as caricatures of fanaticism but as complex social groups: devoted, rebellious, shaped by territory and economics and history. His images catch the quiet moments — the preparation of banners, the choreography of movement — as well as the charged ones.
Zingale’s work grounds the exhibition in Catania’s own heartbeat. For a city that has lived through crisis, rebirth, and reinvention, its ultras are a mirror of resilience.
2LAB: A Home for the Contemporary Archive
Founded by Carmelo and Mattia Stompo, 2LAB has become one of Italy’s most exciting independent spaces for contemporary photography. Based in the historic centre of Catania, it blends exhibitions, residencies, publishing, and education to build a community around visual culture.
NO FAIR PLAY is part of MotoImmobile, their biennial program dedicated to the photographic archive — to memory as both document and living organism.
What 2LAB has created with this exhibition is a triangulation of identity:
England. Naples. Catania.
Three cities whose stories could not be more different — yet whose football cultures share the same emotional DNA.
More Than Ultras, More Than Football
NO FAIR PLAY shows what happens when photography becomes anthropology, when images stop being decoration and become testimony.
Here, ultras are not mythologised, sanitised, or condemned. They are understood.
These photographs ask questions about:
– how identity is formed
– who gets to belong
– what it means to resist
– and how communities build themselves through ritual, territory, and memory
It is an exhibition for anyone who has ever stood in a stadium and felt part of something larger than themselves.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
NO FAIR PLAY — Photography, Identity, Defiance
19 December 2025 – 18 January 2026
2LAB — Via Porta di Ferro 36/38, Catania
Opening: 19 December, 7 PM
Admission: Reserved for members (membership available at the venue)
More info: duelab.org | @duelab_____
