Se son rose.. suoneranno

Within «15 Portrait 15 Poets», Elmerindo Fiore is placed at the point where common language loses its automatism and individual identity resists the impersonal verdict of fortune. Zampogna reprises the method of contamination that runs through his practice, but applies it here to his concrete relationship with a poet friend: the recognisable portrait does not celebrate an isolated personality, but exposes it to friction with formulas already worn down by use. The error introduced into the proverb interrupts collective memory at the very moment it summons it, making language an unstable field in which the subject can still emerge.

Replacing «fioriranno», meaning “will bloom”, with «suoneranno», meaning “will sound”, deprives the phrase of its predictable conclusion and converts the natural promise of roses into an acoustic event that cannot be returned to conventional wisdom. The incongruity does not cancel meaning, but sets it in motion again, just as the pink that invades margins, face and clothing weakens the separation between individual and surface without dissolving recognisability. This opening is answered by «Non hai vinto», meaning “You have not won”, a diminished formula almost absorbed by the image, which returns the verbal game to the anonymous logic of the scratchcard. Poetic language and the code of the prize thus meet as opposing forces: one alters expectations, while the other assigns a definitive outcome.

The work transfers into the sphere of friendship and personal memory a tension already central to Zampogna’s practice, that between lived experience and collective devices that claim to interpret it. The poet remains identifiable, but is not fixed within a monumental identity: he persists inside the interference among image, proverb and verdict. Portraiture thus becomes a critical test of common language. Where the maxim promises order and the game decrees a loss, verbal deviation preserves a space of possibility that no formula can close.