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Within the Butchers series, slaughterhouse violence loses its exceptional status because the act of labour is absorbed into an ornamental setting that turns drama into a scene available for visual consumption. Zampogna does not simply contrast brutality with decorative beauty. He makes the two registers coincide, so that work upon the animal body can appear both concrete and strangely ordinary. He thus continues his reflection on the contamination of “real reality” and “media reality,” but replaces the advertising window with a domestic support already charged with images, capable of making violence familiar even before it is represented.

The wallpaper, populated by oversized leaves and monkeys, turns the slaughterhouse setting into an exotic and indifferent decoration, erasing the hierarchy between organism, environment and spectacle. Bent over an action the image does not allow us to identify precisely, the worker is crossed and almost held by this printed proliferation. His body remains present, but loses its autonomy and becomes one episode among branches, animals and fruit. The red matter spreading across the lower edge prevents the scene from dissolving entirely into ornament. Its density preserves the weight of flesh and labour, while its splashes interrupt the regular continuity of the pattern. Yet even this trace tends to merge with the design, as though blood itself could become another arabesque.

The work therefore carries defused drama to the point where the violent event can no longer be clearly separated from the form that makes it viewable. The monkeys observe without bearing witness, the foliage receives without protecting, and the figure works without becoming a moral protagonist. In this troubling equivalence, Zampogna identifies a condition of contemporary perception: trauma is not denied, but subjected to a visual regime that domesticates it, repeats it and finally integrates it into the everyday landscape. What remains is not the denunciation of a single act, but the awareness that an image can neutralise drama at the very moment it continues to show it.