Mata 5

Mata 5 stages the survival of myth as a conflict between the uniqueness of ritual presence and the impersonal repetition of the media image. In the Mata & Grifone series, Zampogna does not reconstruct the legend as an intact origin, but subjects it to the method of contamination that has shaped his practice since Artmedia. Mata thus enters into contact with a visual code already produced and circulating. The memory of southern Italy is not opposed to the present as an uncontaminated refuge. It can become visible again only through the forms by which the present organises and consumes images.

The crowned frontality preserves the giantess’s ceremonial authority, but its fixity also exposes her as an already codified figure, suspended among processional simulacrum, portrait, and theatrical apparition. Around her, the fabric printed with comic panels multiplies an alien and discontinuous narrative, transforming ritual space into a serial flow. The repeated black-and-white comic does not merely provide a background. It opposes the figure’s chromatic concentration with a temporality made of sequences, interruptions, and returns. Mata appears to emerge from this media regime, yet cannot fully separate herself from it. Painting restores body and colour to her, while the support continues to hold her within a reproducible surface.

The work therefore brings the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” into the territory of collective memory. In earlier cycles, Zampogna showed how advertising, magazine covers, and the formulas of gambling could reorganise the contemporary face and its desires. Here, the same problem affects an archaic figure connected to celebration and communal transmission. Myth does not disappear, but it loses the possibility of presenting itself as an original presence. What remains is an ambiguous persistence: Mata retains her authority at the very moment when the surrounding seriality converts her into one image among others.