Mata, “A Gigantessa”

Mata, “A Gigantessa” stages a ritual memory that returns to the present only when ornament fractures its claim to monumentality and reveals it as a constructed image. In the Mata & Grifone cycle, begun in 2010, Zampogna treats the giantess neither as a folkloric document nor as the means to restore an intact southern origin. Instead, he subjects her to the principle of contamination that runs throughout his research: after the appropriation of Artmedia and the interchangeability of “real reality” and “media reality,” myth too can survive only by entering a visual regime foreign to its antiquity. The ritual figure thus becomes a presence at once remote and current, solemn and artificial.

The floral motif passes without interruption across the surrounding field and the yellow garment, weakening the boundary between body, costume, and support until Mata seems to emerge from the fabric itself. Ornament does not accompany the figure, but compromises her autonomy: what should assert itself as a giant is absorbed by a domestic, repetitive pattern capable of turning collective memory into surface. At the same time, the rigid frontality, suspended between the ceremonial crown and markedly everyday footwear, produces an uncertain identity. Mata retains the authority of a processional effigy, yet her elongated, permeable body remains exposed to the discontinuity of the codes from which it is composed.

The work therefore transfers a central problem in Zampogna’s practice into the territory of myth: no image reaches the gaze without already having been mediated, assembled, and made available for new uses. Here contamination does not empty tradition of meaning, but prevents it from being fixed within a pacified past. The giantess reappears as a visual machine in which ritual, decoration, and everyday life never fully cohere. What results is an unstable presence that allows the legend to remain recognisable precisely while showing how every shared memory depends on the contemporary forms through which it is made visible again.