Mata 3

The work subjects the ritual memory of Mata to a repetitive and commercial visual regime, in which myth can reappear only through contamination by the present. In the Mata & Grifone series, Zampogna neither reconstructs the legend philologically nor seeks an intact image of the South of his childhood. Instead, he transfers the giantess into the method running throughout his practice, based on encounters between incongruous codes and on the interchangeability of lived experience and already mediated images. The ritual figure thus retains her public recognisability, but receives it from an environment that does not belong to her and prevents any pacified return to origins.

The serial pattern of fish, boats and fishing related words turns the space of legend into a surface of consumption, like a sampler in which images and language matter chiefly because they can be repeated. Against this uniformity, the frontal monumentality and upward gaze grant Mata a solemn presence without releasing her from the fabric. The print resurfaces across the lightened torso and fractures its compactness: the body seems both to impose itself upon the ground and to be permeated by it. The fabric does not simply receive the painting, but acts as a pre-existing code that absorbs figure, dress and space into the same decorative circuit. Even the necklace, reduced to a suspended line, preserves a ceremonial residue without restoring full corporeal substance to the giantess.

This oscillation between authority and absorption distinguishes the recovery of folklore from a celebration of identity. Ritual memory survives because it accepts becoming a contaminated image, exposed to the seriality that organises contemporary vision. Zampogna thus transfers into southern Italian myth the tension already active between “real reality” and “media reality”: Mata does not represent an available origin, but a presence that the present makes visible precisely while altering its stability. The viewer is left with a figure at once near and unreachable, as solemn as she is precarious.