Animali portafortuna

Animali portafortuna stages the reduction of hope to a consumer code, making individual presence coincide with the impersonal promise of gambling. In the Scratch & Win series, Zampogna does not simply represent gambling, but adopts lottery graphics as a grammar capable of organising everyday experience. The desire for economic change is transferred into a system of figures, prices and combinations, where luck appears available to everyone precisely because it has been made into a commodity. The customary contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” here takes a form that is both ironic and subdued: the person does not observe the game from outside, but inhabits its promise.

The monochrome female figure, superimposed on the incomplete yellow lettering, retains an ordinary recognisability while being absorbed into the promotional language supposedly addressing her. Her stillness does not construct a psychological portrait. Instead, it makes her an anonymous unit within the mechanism of the prize. On the adjoining sheet, the turkey enlarged to dominate the field contains other animals, fragmentary words and monetary signs. What should function as a lucky emblem becomes a map to be examined, a surface on which hope takes the form of an instruction. The material division into two pieces keeps body and graphic apparatus distinct, but the continuity of the ground and the proximity of the images prevent their true separation.

The work thus carries the mythology of sudden fortune to its most concrete consequence: identity itself is measured against the remote possibility of winning. Serial numbers, price and propitiatory figures do not promise an imaginative elsewhere, but a catharsis already devalued by its commercial packaging. The tragic register of Zampogna’s irony resides in this discrepancy. The game offers an escape, yet its language has already transformed waiting into consumption and the person into an interchangeable recipient.