Senza titolo 5

Senza titolo 5 stages flesh as a shared threshold between the animal body, cultural identity, and erotic consumption, inaugurating within Zampogna’s practice a figurative regime in which lived reality and media imagery begin to contaminate one another. Made in 1995, immediately after the end of the Artmedia experience, the work retains the principle of appropriation but shifts its field from art history to the contemporary circulation of bodies. In the Meat series, figuration therefore does not restore an integral reality. Instead, it places heterogeneous subjects within a single economy of looking, in which the slaughtered animal, the public figure, and the pornographic body become competing forms of display.

The bird carcass, enlarged to an almost monumental presence, is absorbed by the violet field, which erases the site of slaughter and converts organic matter into an anonymous apparition. The insert associated with Banana Yoshimoto only apparently opposes this central mass: the face beside the fruit constructs an identity through an immediate condensation, close to advertising logic and to the easy equivalence of name and image. Below, a sequence of small frames fragments the pornographic body into details and serial variations. The difference in scale establishes no hierarchy, but articulates two modes of the same consumption: the physical evidence of flesh and its transformation into a visual repertoire.

The work thus occupies a decisive passage between the borrowing practised in Artmedia and the later media mythologies. Appropriation no longer concerns only images already coded by art, but extends to literature, pornography, and mass culture, making their proximity into a critical device. Unlike the later Butchers series, where drama would be absorbed into the ornament of fabric, violence here has not yet been pacified. It remains exposed through the disproportion between the animal body and the inserts, yet their graphic organisation has already made it consumable. What remains before the viewer is an identity without stable depth, produced through the conjunction of available signs and bodies.