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In Meat, social conflict enters the space of slaughter as an already mediated image, transforming the proximity between animal bodies and a political crowd into a measure of collective vulnerability. Made immediately after the end of the Artmedia experience, the work retains the principle of appropriation but shifts its object from art history to the public circulation of images. The trade union demonstration is treated neither as a self-sufficient document nor slaughter as a simple allegory. Their conjunction instead opens a friction between political participation, the exposure of bodies and the loss of individual identity.

The sequence of hanging sides, compressed into a dominant blue that reduces their organic substance, converts the meat into an impersonal, serial rhythm. The screen-printed insert of the demonstration intervenes in this continuity, its photographic discontinuity acting as a media window: the crowd acquires the same condition of an image displayed, reproduced and subjected to the gaze that governs the carcasses. The contrast between painting and screen-printing ink does not reconcile the two registers but makes their mutual contamination visible. The photograph brings an episode of civic life into the slaughterhouse, while the painted field deprives that episode of the certainty of its context. The work thus avoids establishing a direct narrative equivalence between workers and animals. Instead, it insists on the device that makes both readable as anonymous collectivities.

This transition places the work at a decisive moment in Zampogna’s research: appropriation no longer concerns only recognisable artistic codes, but the way current events are isolated, framed and consumed. Before the dialectic between “real reality” and “media reality” becomes explicit in later cycles, it takes shape here as a material collision between two surfaces. What remains is not an unequivocal commentary on protest, but the suspicion that collective action, once transformed into an image, may also lose its historical depth and become a visual commodity.