Critical text
The work stages meat as the place where material violence and social conflict are made equivalent by the circulation of images, transforming the montage inherited from Artmedia into a critique of contemporary visibility. In the Meat series, begun immediately after the group experience ended, Zampogna does not abandon appropriation, but shifts its operation from art history toward a present composed of bodies, labour, and public communication. The butcher’s display is not merely a violent subject. It becomes the structure within which the physical reality of death meets images already destined for reproduction, while collective protest enters the same visual regime as merchandise.
The sequence of hanging animal bodies occupies almost the entire field and turns the repetition of death into an anonymous rhythm, close to a system of production. The cold tonality tempers the organic fact without erasing it, so violence remains visible but appears already subjected to an initial defusing. Across this pictorial continuity, the inserts showing trade union demonstrations and the graphic sign attributable to Keith Haring act as media windows. They introduce the language of conflict and that of an art transformed into a public code, but their reduced scale also makes them fragile, almost incidental information before the serial evidence of the carcasses. The montage does not explain the relationship among the images. Instead, it measures their perceptual inequality.
Compared with the Artmedia phase, appropriation is no longer aimed primarily at returning twentieth-century languages to play. Here it tests what happens when a recognisable artistic reference and the documentation of struggle are absorbed by a surface dominated by exposed meat. The work thus anticipates a problem that would become central in the later Butchers series: not the representation of drama, but the way its mediation diminishes its intensity and makes it consumable. The viewer is left with an uneasy coincidence among slaughter, labour, and image, without the montage granting a moral hierarchy capable of reconciling them.
