Animali porta fortuna

In Animali porta fortuna, Zampogna turns the promise of gambling into a total environment, where ordinary life is absorbed by a commercial mythology that assigns fortune the place of experience. In the Scratch & Win series, the ticket is not merely an appropriated and enlarged object, but a grammar capable of organising bodies, desires and possibilities. The hope of economic change thus assumes the form of an already coded setting, within which the subject seems to live before she can even choose.

The female figure in greyscale is absorbed into the enlarged graphics of the ticket, which convert an everyday presence into a piece within a system of prefabricated expectations. Her photographic consistency guarantees no greater reality: compressed among words, price, serial number and auspicious images, she appears as reproducible as the signs around her. The illustrated animals, disproportionate and chromatically artificial, replace any possible symbolic value with the seductive immediacy of the commercial icon. Their incongruous relationship with the body produces no fable, but makes visible the alienated equivalence between “real reality” and “media reality”. Even the warning “NON GRATTARE” ironically restrains the gesture on which the promise depends, exposing desire as command and prohibition at once.

The work therefore takes the logic of Scratch & Win beyond a quotation of popular culture: it does not represent someone trying her luck, but shows a life already formatted by the language of probability. Unlike the earlier advertising contaminations, the media window no longer interrupts the figure from outside, because it has now become her inhabitable space. Zampogna reveals the ironic and tragic character of this coexistence: the promised catharsis remains mediocre and deferred, while individual identity survives as an available image within a repertoire of prizes, mascots and combinations.