Senza titolo
1995
- Year
- 1995
- Dimensions
- 120 × 160 cm
- Edition
- Unique
- Availability
- Available
Series
Critical text
The work transforms collective memory into a media surface, where the Ossuary of the Verano Cemetery and the trade union demonstration lose the distance separating historical commemoration from present conflict. Made in 1995, immediately after the conclusion of the Artmedia experience, it belongs to Meat and retains from appropriation not so much the quotation of twentieth-century art as the principle of montage between images already invested with public authority. The place entrusted with preserving the dead and the political action of assembled bodies thus enter the same construction, in which history does not appear as a continuous narrative, but as a set of traces made simultaneous.
The dominant red absorbs landscape, monuments and screen-printed inserts into a single visual regime, making every element oscillate between material presence, document and reproduction. Black does not restore depth to the place, but imprints it as an image subjected to impersonal circulation: trees, paths and funerary structures remain recognisable while losing atmospheric substance. Within this chromatic field, the juxtaposition with the trade union demonstration converts two forms of collective presence, the commemorated and the politically active, into motionless apparitions. Screen-printing ink therefore does not illustrate an event beside a place. It introduces the discontinuity of information into painting and fractures its apparent unity.
Within Meat, the body operates primarily through its absence or transformation: it is the body consigned to the ossuary, but also the plural body that acquires identity through trade union action. Here Zampogna anticipates the later contamination between “real reality” and “media reality”, showing that both depend on devices capable of selecting, fixing and consuming memory. The work does not equate death and protest on a narrative level. Instead, it subjects them to the same visual pressure, allowing a more radical question to emerge about the survival of experience when access to it passes through public images that can no longer be separated from their reproduction.











