Performance 1, 2024

Performance does not entrust movement to autonomous bodies: in the Contemporary Interferences series, Zampogna makes the fabric the field that distributes their presence while calling it into question. Dance becomes a test of visibility rather than a record of a completed action. Here the contamination of “real reality” and “media reality,” central to his practice, requires neither an advertising window nor a recognizable quotation. It operates through the difficulty of separating what belongs to the bodies from what belongs to the surface on which they appear. The title promises an event; the image instead suspends the possibility of recovering it as a single moment.

The small black marks repeated across the fabric also cross the figures, denying the bodies the continuity they would need to stand apart from the ground. The colored discs intensify this instability: they punctuate the space and meet the clothing, keeping the distinction between decoration and painted presence unsettled. The gestures of the four figures, directed in different ways, likewise suggest a shared action without assembling it into a legible choreography. The fabric, then, does not simply provide a setting for dance. Its pattern intervenes in the perception of rhythm, breaks up contours and subjects the bodies to the same repetition that organizes the visual field.

Unlike the media images inserted into figurative painting in earlier works, interference here does not arrive as a recognizable external fragment. It already inhabits the conditions that let us see a gesture and attribute it to someone. The number of figures offers no guarantee of a stable relationship: each movement appears to seek its own space, while the pattern draws it back to a common surface. What remains is a performance that cannot be grasped as a unified spectacle, but appears through disjunctions, overlaps and partial presences.