Animali porta fortuna

Animali porta fortuna stages the promise of wealth as a device that absorbs ordinary life and reduces it to an interchangeable sign within the language of gambling. In the Scratch & Win series, Zampogna does not simply represent the desire for luck. He appropriates the visual grammar of the ticket and enlarges it until it becomes the figure’s environment. The character’s “real reality” and the lottery’s “media reality” can no longer be distinguished: the individual inhabits the formula that is meant to redeem him, while that same formula determines his value and legibility.

The almost life-size human figure interrupts the writing and fields of the game, yet its prominence does not restore an autonomous presence. Its monochrome treatment makes it resemble an image already reproduced, alien to the chromatic saturation around it yet incorporated into its mechanism. Beside it, the large yellow bird converts the lucky animal into an advertising emblem. The white gaps crossing its body, together with the names and numbers that remain legible, fracture the promise without erasing its appeal. The composition thus keeps the conflict between seduction and malfunction active: what invites belief in the prize already bears the marks of a loss of meaning.

The work develops the ironic and tragic analysis that characterises the series: luck appears not as an exceptional event, but as an industrial code applied to existence. The disproportion between the figure’s scale and the modest hope entrusted to gambling makes visible the “mediocre catharsis” identified in the archive sources. Zampogna leaves the viewer before an image in which person, animal and promotional formula share the same status. There is no longer a subject who uses the ticket, but a life already organised by its promise.