Critical text
Gioca a scopa 1 turns the promise of a prize into a device of equivalence, in which individual identity and commercial language appear subject to the same serial logic. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna does not depict the ticket as an object, but expands its code until it becomes the space of experience itself. The promise of a small, immediate win offers no real alternative to the present. Instead, it organises a condition in which personal desire can be expressed only through predetermined instructions, symbols and amounts. The figures enter the media mythology of gambling without illustrating it, absorbed by a grammar that makes hope measurable and repeatable.
The duplication of the female figure introduces a difference that the device immediately tends to neutralise. Similar but not identical in pose and definition, the two presences suggest individuality as variation within a shared matrix, while the continuous field of colour consigns them to the same impersonal surface. The enlarged graphics of Scopa retain the ticket’s visual authority through cards, instructions and prize value, but the loss of practical function turns every sign into a suspended promise. The two-sheet structure also operates critically: the join divides the field without truly separating its regimes, making body and commercial communication appear as contiguous parts of a single montage.
The work therefore advances Zampogna’s contamination of «real reality» and «media reality» beyond the terms established after Artmedia. The appropriated image is no longer superimposed on the figure as a separate window, since it now determines the figure’s context, scale and possible readings. Against the catharsis promised by the game, the two presences display neither excitement nor redemption. They remain contained within a system that offers the prize as the only available form of change. The irony arises from the disproportion between the graphic emphasis and the modest sum. Its tragic aspect lies in the fact that identity, too, seems reduced to a combination, a variant and a state of waiting.
