Chi dorme….

Chi dorme…. stages desire as an identity administered by two equivalent promises, the automatic wisdom of the proverb and the programmed luck of the scratchcard. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna does not use the ticket as a merely popular object, but enlarges its grammar until it coincides with the space of representation. The saying left unfinished by the title thus loses the certainty of a completed maxim and assumes the same structure as a win: something still to be revealed, although its outcome is already governed by an impersonal code. Individual life is placed between expectation, recognition and verification.

The monochrome portrait, enlarged until it occupies the gaming device, turns the person into a presence subjected to its rules and expectations. The frontal pose preserves an intense recognisability, but does not restore an autonomous identity: the face emerges within an orange surface shared with schematic animals, truncated words and areas to be uncovered. The repeated animals and partly erased boxes convert proverb and prize into signs to be recognised, matched and verified. The distinction between figurative image and commercial design also weakens, since acrylic and screen printing ink hold singular presence and anonymous reproducibility together. The subject’s “real reality” and the game’s “media reality” do not merely overlap: each becomes legible through the other.

The work therefore shifts the critique of advertising towards a more ordinary discipline of desire. The prize does not promise money alone, but offers an elementary model for interpreting existence, composed of correspondences, instructions and possible results. The proverb operates in the same way, reducing experience to a ready-made formula. Zampogna thus presents a subjectivity that remains visible but is deprived of its own measure, compelled to inhabit collective codes that anticipate what it should hope for and understand. The promised catharsis is mediocre precisely because it replaces change with the expectation of a favourable combination.