Animali porta fortuna

Within the Scratch & Win cycle, the work transforms luck from a symbolic belief into a commercial code, placing individual presence under the impersonal authority of the promise of winning. Zampogna neither simply depicts a ticket nor retrieves the animal as an auspicious figure. He enlarges the grammar of the lottery until it becomes the environment against which a life is measured. The contamination between “real reality” and “media reality,” developed in earlier series, here takes the form of a seductive yet inaccessible contract. The image promises economic change, but consigns the subject to a system of signs that organises desire, expectation and probability.

The disproportion between the large emblematic bird and the blue human figure turns the lucky animal into a dominant trademark, while reducing the person to an accessory presence, almost absorbed by the layout. This difference in scale does more than create disorientation. It makes visible the power exercised by a commercial mythology when it takes on the dimensions of experience. The panels barred by the words “NON GRATTARE” and the game instructions work in the same direction. They promise a revelation while postponing and regulating it, turning hope into obedience to a procedure. The screen printed language retains the impersonal hardness of promotional communication, while the acrylic does not restore full autonomy to the figure.

The work thus clarifies the cycle's ironic and tragic character. The announced economic catharsis remains mediocre, not because the prize is necessarily small, but because the imagination of change is already contained within the format that sells it. Luck does not open onto an elsewhere. It becomes an administered surface, populated by emblems as legible as they are indifferent. What remains for the viewer is an unresolved tension between the festive immediacy of the visual code and the marginality of the subject who inhabits it, a sign of a present in which even personal desire arrives already packaged.