Il Mercante

Il Mercante transforms an exchange between two individuals into a scene governed by the impersonal grammar of the prize, where every relationship risks taking the form of a wager. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna does not depict the ticket as a mere consumer object, but expands its code until it becomes the environment of experience itself. The encounter thus loses its autonomy and is drawn into a logic of allocation, possession and winning. The title shares this ambiguity: it establishes neither who is selling nor what is being exchanged, but introduces an economic function that absorbs both subjects.

The two darkened figures are rendered anonymous as their gestures appear to circulate a small object, turning the encounter into a transaction without stable identities. Their bodies retain the weight of a lived situation, but their opacity prevents any reconstruction of circumstances or roles, allowing the media device to define them. The red fields and the words «LA TUA CARTA» («YOUR CARD») and «PREMIO» («PRIZE»), fragmented and partly concealed by the bodies, extend the ticket’s commercial code across the entire space of the relationship. The promise remains visible but never becomes accessible: repeated, interrupted and stripped of usable instructions, it functions as a command without an outcome.

The work brings Zampogna’s reflection on «real reality» and «media reality» into an everyday gesture, showing that their contamination affects not only images but also relationships between people. The expectation of personal wealth, central to «Scratch & Win», assumes a subtler and more tragic form here: the prize is not simply missed, since it has already provided the model through which the encounter is read. What remains is a scene in which every gesture can be interpreted as an offer, a stake or an act of verification, while whatever truly passes from one figure to the other remains irreducibly uncertain.