Critical text
Monopoli di Stato turns the promise of gambling into a regime of equivalence that subjects people, objects and desires to the same administered grammar of chance. In the «Scratch & Win» series, Zampogna expands the code of the ticket until it becomes the space of experience itself: he does not represent gambling as an activity separate from life, but shows a life already organised by its formulas, invitations and probabilities. The institutional reference in the title and visible wording thus removes gambling from the realm of exception. Private hope appears to be produced and regulated by a public language capable of turning anticipation of a prize into ordinary behaviour.
Rendered in the same attenuated graphic register, the two figures and the bicycle lose any hierarchical distinction and seem like elements available within the mechanism of the game. Human presence does not interrupt the promotional surface, but enters it as one more combination, while the everyday object shifts between possession, possible prize and a mere sign of value. Around them, «Gioca a SCOPA» and «Monopoli di Stato», together with the cards and only partly legible instructions, construct a regulated field that solicits action without disclosing its outcome. The diptych intensifies this logic: the image’s continuity must cross a material division, as though the scene itself were subject to distribution into compartments.
The work pushes the contamination between «real reality» and «media reality» towards a more impersonal form. Compared with earlier superimpositions of figures and advertising images, the commercial code here does not merely disturb everyday life, but establishes the conditions under which it can be read. The prize offers no escape: it makes people and things interchangeable within a system that produces desire, disciplines its gestures and continually postpones its fulfilment. What remains is a static sociality, summoned by the game but deprived of any stake capable of genuine transformation.
