La Giganta

La Giganta stages the Southern Italian myth as a collective body that can return to the present only by allowing ornament and everyday life to pass through it. In the Mata & Grifone cycle, Zampogna does not reconstruct the legend as an intact origin, separate from the present. Instead, he subjects the female giant to the principle of contamination that runs throughout his research: what belongs to the ritual memory of Southern Italy becomes visible within a surface already charged with domestic and decorative codes. The myth is therefore not illustrated, but tested through its ability to survive as a present image.

The floral pattern of the fabric surfaces within the monumental figure’s torso and clothing, making her boundaries permeable and preventing the body from asserting itself as an autonomous volume. The giantess seems both to emerge from the surface and to fall back into it, as though her processional authority depended on the very element that weakens her substance. Below, an adult carrying a child introduces an everyday scale beside the ritual one: this encounter does not reduce the giant to spectacle, but connects her disproportion to the concrete continuity of bodies, generations and transmission. Ornament, effigy and lived presence thus share the same space without fully merging.

The work carries into the realm of legend a problem already central to Zampogna’s practice, the interchangeability of experience and image. Here, however, contamination does not take the form of a superimposed media window: the fabric itself enters the figure and constructs her appearance. The vertical format retains the public scale of the banner and the processional effigy, while the permeability of the body removes any claim to archaic purity. La Giganta thus leaves the viewer before a memory that does not dominate the present from above, but continues to exist because it accepts being inhabited by the present.