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The work transforms the slaughterhouse into a display mechanism, where the ordered repetition of death diminishes its trauma and makes that very diminution its critical core. Within the Butchers series, Zampogna does not dwell on the act of slaughter, but on the visual regime that allows violence to become an administered, serial, almost customary presence. The site of production thus assumes the logic of a shop window: what should retain the irreducible weight of the body is arranged to be counted, compared, and consumed by the gaze.

The compressed sequence of suspended carcasses turns the bodies into nearly equivalent modules, bringing violence, inventory, and decoration into alignment. Anatomical differences do not disappear, but they are subordinated to a rhythm that absorbs every singularity and establishes an impersonal continuity. In the lower band, red drips interrupt this discipline and cross the two skulls like the return of a substance that the order above had attempted to neutralize. The color does not reconstruct a bloody scene. It acts as a residue, contaminating grid, surface, and skeletal remains. The contrast between the graphic pallor of the carcasses and the artificial accent of red also prevents a naturalistic reading, shifting the butcher shop from documentation toward a mental and media construction of drama.

Here the defusing characteristic of Butchers arises not from an ornamental support, but from the seriality of the image itself. Animal death becomes legible through an order that normalizes it, while the chromatic traces reveal how incomplete that normalization remains. The work thus continues Zampogna’s investigation into the contamination of «real reality» and «media reality»: it does not oppose the event to its representation, but shows how representation can organize it until it becomes tolerable. What remains for the viewer is an ambiguous threshold, where recognizing violence also means measuring the mechanisms that turn it into surface.