Animali porta fortuna

The work transforms the hope of deliverance into a device that equates individual presence with the impersonal symbols of luck, showing how gambling absorbs life into its own grammar. In the Scratch & Win cycle, Zampogna does not simply represent the desire for wealth, but the visual code that makes it plausible and repeatable. The promise of an economic breakthrough thus takes the form of an everyday mythology in which the individual, the lucky animal and the instruction to play belong to the same system of expectations. The person’s “real reality” and the ticket’s “media reality” are no longer opposed. They become interchangeable elements within an image that assigns probability the task of organising experience.

The monochrome figure, treated with an almost photographic quality, interrupts the illustrative register yet remains incorporated into it as another game symbol. Its frontality does not assert a stable identity. The uniform green brings it close to the artificial landscape and makes it available to the same symbolic circulation as the animal. The enlarged fish, outlined through simplified, knowing graphics, introduces not a salvific nature but its promotional version, already converted into a promise. The instruction “DO NOT SCRATCH HERE” reinforces this ambivalence: it marks a limit within an image founded on the impulse to uncover, win and change one’s condition. Even the obstacle, therefore, belongs to the mechanism’s seduction.

The work develops the ironic and tragic analysis through which Zampogna examines the media mythologies of the present. The irony arises from the apparently natural coexistence of person and mascot. The tragic element lies instead in their equivalence, since life enters the game without gaining any more substance than its graphic repertoire. The work allows a diminished catharsis to emerge, entrusted not to collective change but to a lucky combination. Within this economy of the image, personal desire survives only as a programmed state of waiting.