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The work stages not the exceptional nature of violence, but its normalization, absorbing slaughter into an ornamental continuity that makes defusing the true contemporary trauma. In the Butchers series, Zampogna does not emphasize the bloody gesture as a culminating episode. Instead, he places it within a visual regime capable of receiving, softening and making it consumable. The processing of the animal body thus loses the character of a separate event and becomes one of the images through which society organizes its distance from the material consequences of consumption. The contamination between “real reality” and “media reality,” central to the artist’s practice, operates here without explicit advertising devices: the very act of seeing behaves like an instrument of neutralization.

The fabric’s floral pattern passes through setting, worker and carcass, turning the divide between domestic decoration and productive violence into a frictionless visual coexistence. The flowers do not frame the subject, but resurface within the bodies and interrupt their gravity, as though every presence could be returned to the same decorative repertoire. This assimilation is only partly resisted by the red and violet density of the animal mass, whose chromatic weight retains a memory of flesh even as it consigns it to the surface. The human figure, lightened to partial transparency, instead loses substance and individual responsibility: the action remains legible, but the person performing it already seems absorbed by the support and by the ordinary repetition of labor.

The work therefore carries the reflection of Butchers beyond a moral opposition between victim and executioner. Both belong to the same field, subjected to an image that does not erase drama, but reduces its intensity until it coincides with furnishing. The fabric retains domestic and theatrical associations, and it is precisely this familiarity that prevents violence from appearing alien. What remains for the viewer is not a sudden scandal, but a condition more difficult to reject: the contemporary capacity to live alongside trauma once its image has been made continuous, pleasing and repeatable.