Senza titolo 6

Senza titolo 6 stages the transformation of flesh into a consumable image, making slaughter the point at which material violence, cultural memory, and media circulation become mutually interchangeable. Made in 1995, immediately after the conclusion of the Artmedia experience, the work retains its method of appropriation and recontextualisation while shifting it from art history to bodily vulnerability. In the Meat series, figuration does not restore an intact reality. It subjects what appears concrete to the same regime of extraction, montage, and loss of context that governs the public image.

The suspended carcass, enlarged until it dominates the field, retains the weight of a killed body, yet the yellow and black tonality corrodes its substance, converting it into an exposed sign that is both material and already reproduced. The disproportion creates no celebratory monumentality. It makes violence unavoidable and, at the same time, strangely available to the gaze. The two photographic inserts, referring to Lucio Dalla and Mimmo Paladino and to the Group of Eight, interrupt this evidence without supplying a narrative explanation. Their reduced scale makes them operate as media windows: contemporary culture and political history enter beside the flesh as equivalent fragments, removed from their respective circumstances and recomposed within a single discontinuous surface.

The work thus marks a decisive transition in Zampogna’s research. The procedure developed through Artmedia does not disappear with the return to figuration, but becomes a grammar capable of involving the body, celebrity, and collective memory. Before advertising and daily life are explicitly made interchangeable in later cycles, contamination already operates here as a crisis of hierarchies: the slaughtered animal is not an isolated emblem, and the photographs are not commentary. Each image diminishes and intensifies the others, leaving the viewer with a reality in which trauma can be seen only through forms already prepared for circulation.