Animali portafortuna

The work turns luck into a media code superimposed on ordinary life, showing how the promise of a prize impoverishes experience instead of redeeming it. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna does not represent gambling as a separate episode, but applies its grammar to everyday reality. Two presences caught in an open space are thus absorbed into an image that promises a possible change of condition without giving it any substance. The lucky animal does not introduce a fairy tale dimension. It functions as a ready-made media mythology, capable of converting desire into expectation and expectation into consumption.

The dominant green unifies landscape and figures, producing the impersonal appearance of an already coded surface and weakening the distinction between lived scene and promotional support. The two men remain recognisable, but their presence appears subordinate to the visual logic containing them, as if life had become the background of a ticket still awaiting interpretation. Across this field, the enlarged bird outlined in artificial colours imposes another scale of reality: the words inscribed within its body and the drips extending its silhouette turn the icon into a device that is both seductive and unstable. It is unclear whether it announces a win or exposes its arbitrary character. This very ambivalence prevents the promotional figure from functioning as a simple promise.

The work completes a shift central to Zampogna’s research, from the contamination of «real reality» and «media reality» to their substantial interchangeability. The code of gambling no longer interrupts the scene from outside, but organises its colour, hierarchies and possible readings. The irony of the juxtaposition therefore retains a tragic foundation: the economic catharsis evoked by the scratchcard is most effective precisely because it remains mediocre and improbable. The viewer is left with a world in which even hope assumes the serial, anonymous and consumable form of an advertising image.