Animali portafortuna

The work transforms luck into a media apparatus that absorbs ordinary identity into a promise already packaged and regulated. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna does not simply represent the desire for wealth, but adopts its visual grammar to show how it organizes everyday experience. The imagery of the ticket thus becomes a mental environment: hope no longer arises from an open possibility, but from a commercial repertoire of symbols, commands, and combinations. The promised catharsis remains mediocre because it translates a change in life into the instantaneous logic of the prize.

The enlarged, smiling cow covered with currency signs reduces the lucky animal to a consumable mascot, making economic aspiration both childish and serial. Its crisp, brightly colored design retains the communicative efficiency of promotional graphics, while the grayscale figure, superimposed on the title and the «DO NOT SCRATCH» instructions, appears less as an autonomous individual than as a presence inserted into the code of the game and held there. Acrylic and screen printing ink do not reconcile these registers within a unified scene: they keep perceptible the distance between the body and the impersonal language surrounding it. The prohibition, repeated across the surface, also introduces a decisive paradox: the image stimulates desire while simultaneously administering its gestures, timing, and limits.

This work draws a concrete consequence from the contamination between «real reality» and «media reality» that is already central to Zampogna’s research. Here the two domains do not confront one another, because the person is already housed within the advertising surface and the lucky symbol has acquired the scale of a real event. The result is irony without liberation: the game offers identity a possible transformation, but makes it conceivable only through the codes that devalue it. The viewer is left with a visible and immediate promise whose accessibility coincides with its insubstantiality.