Grifone, “U Giganti”

Grifone, “U Giganti” stages myth as a presence that survives not through the purity of origins, but through the contamination of ritual authority by the contemporary image. In the Mata & Grifone series, begun in 2010, Zampogna brings into the present a figure connected with southern processional traditions and the places of his childhood, without reconstructing an intact past. Instead, the giant is subjected to the principle of interference that runs throughout his research: like the images appropriated in Artmedia and the later media mythologies, legend too becomes visible by entering a system of alien codes.

The floral fabric passes uninterrupted through setting and body, absorbing the giant into a domestic decorative order that destabilises his monumentality. The long painted garment does not fully separate the figure from its support, but allows the serial pattern to resurface, making the character oscillate between processional effigy, pictorial apparition and silhouette incorporated into ornament. The red face and black plume concentrate the figure’s ceremonial authority, yet their emphasis also carries something artificial and theatrical. Lower down, a second face inscribed within the clothing fractures the character’s unity: the costume becomes a surface containing another presence and prevents the body from coinciding with a single identity.

The work thus transfers the earlier contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” into the field of collective memory. Myth offers no route back to an accessible origin, because it can appear only through a material already marked by seriality and ornament. This very failure to coincide restores its efficacy: Grifone retains the frontality of a ritual image, yet appears at once remote and current, solemn and vulnerable. Zampogna does not resolve this oscillation. He presents it to the viewer as the contemporary condition of tradition, which continues to live only by accepting transformation.