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The work stages the transformation of violence into a consumable image, making the pacified coexistence of butcher, carcasses, and ornament the true drama of representation. In the Butchers series, Zampogna does not insist on the exceptional nature of the bloody act, but on the ease with which the gaze can accept it once it has been returned to a stable visual order. Slaughter thus becomes the place where his investigation into the contamination of experience and mediation assumes a particularly grave form: trauma need not be concealed, only made compatible with the surface that conveys it.

The damask fabric absorbs the butcher’s action and the suspended bodies into the continuity of its ornament, reducing the distance between a bloody working scene and a domestic covering. The floral pattern does not simply soften what is happening. It organizes it as a repeatable configuration, almost already prepared to be viewed without friction. The shared reduction of the presences to pallid tones works in the same direction: human and animals belong to a single regime of imagery, while the distinction between agent and victim loses its immediacy. The verticality of the carcasses might impose the weight of death, yet their regular arrangement draws them toward the decorative rhythm of the ground.

The issue, then, is not limited to violence inflicted on the animal body. The work examines the cultural apparatus that neutralizes this violence while leaving it fully visible, according to the logic of media defusing that runs through Zampogna’s practice. Unlike the earlier advertising mythologies and the promises of Scratch & Win, the image here does not sell a desire, but renders ordinary what should interrupt perception. The viewer is left with a scene devoid of emotional eruption, and it is precisely this normality that compels recognition of how deeply ornament can collaborate with habituation.