Sonatori di banda

Sonatori di banda stages the festival as collective memory that survives less through the representation of ritual than through its transformation into an image suspended between popular presence and decoration. In the Mata & Grifone cycle, begun in 2010, the band forms the human and sonic apparatus of the processional world associated with southern Italian traditions and the places of the artist’s childhood. Zampogna does not, however, reconstruct an event in its continuity. He removes the musicians from the route, the crowd and the giants that would normally direct its meaning, allowing the ritual to emerge through an isolated formation already approaching the condition of a repertoire.

The discontinuous arrangement of the musicians breaks the unity of the procession and turns a collective performance into a sequence of apparitions. Some figures advance, while others seem held in an almost photographic frontality, and the intervals between their bodies leave the sound only to be imagined. The band thus retains its communal function but loses the certainty of a shared time. The fabric’s blue motif passes through bodies, uniforms and intervals, absorbing the ritual scene into a domestic, ornamental surface. The print does not receive the image passively: it fractures its cohesion and makes the musicians waver between people, memory and decoration. Even the pale areas supporting them establish no continuous ground, but resemble fragments of provisional space.

The work develops the method of contamination that runs through Zampogna’s practice, transferring it from the dialectic between “real reality” and “media reality” to the relationship between ritual experience and figurative memory. The public image no longer coincides with advertising or current events, but with a tradition already exposed to repetition, reproduction and the loss of its context. The festival does not disappear in this passage. It remains recognisable as an affective and collective structure, yet reaches the viewer in the unstable form of a presence without an event. The band therefore plays for an absent ritual, and this absence makes visible the distance between the persistence of myth and the contemporary conditions of its appearance.