Animali porta fortuna

The work turns fortune into a visual device that engulfs ordinary life, showing how the promise of a prize replaces experience with a predetermined combination of signs. In the «Scratch & Win» cycle, Zampogna does not simply represent the desire for wealth, but the language that makes it repeatable, accessible and at the same time illusory. The popular imagery of the auspicious animal is absorbed into the scratchcard graphic, where chance acquires a price and a procedure. “Real reality” and “media reality” no longer confront each other as separate realms: the former materially enters the latter and accepts its grammar.

Reduced in scale beside the hen and superimposed on the game instructions, the photographic figure loses her narrative autonomy: she inhabits no space, only a promotional surface that treats her as another sign to be combined. The disproportion does not empower the animal. Instead, it reveals the authority that the commercial image has acquired over individual presence. Nor does the enlarged hen, constructed through sharp outlines and screen printed fields, retain the innocence of a popular emblem. Beside the printed price, it becomes a visual commodity that promises protection while referring back to probability. Acrylic and screen printing ink keep the friction among painting, photography and advertising code legible, without resolving it into a plausible scene.

The mediocre catharsis evoked by the cycle lies precisely in this substitution: the regulated, endlessly repeatable gesture of trying at little cost takes the place of any possibility of changing one’s condition. Presented in the 2007 exhibition «Cirkus», the work also enters an entertainment imagery in which daily life appears governed by immediate attractions and serial promises. Zampogna thus completes a central shift in his research: media contamination no longer disturbs the figure from outside, but organises the field in which she can appear. What remains is not the story of a possible win, but an identity made secondary to the machine that produces hope.