Sonatori di banda

Sonatori di banda turns the festival into a memory suspended between popular presence and decoration, showing how ritual survives precisely as its visual unity dissolves. Within Mata & Grifone, begun in the same year, 2010, Zampogna does not reconstruct an original, intact tradition. Instead, he recirculates an image of southern Italian ritual connected to the places of his childhood. The band does not accompany a complete narrative here. It becomes the recognisable residue of a community, entrusted to an image that oscillates between testimony, apparition and collective repertoire.

The musicians’ discontinuous, opposing arrangement fragments the procession and deprives the scene of certainty as a unified event. The bodies seem summoned by the ritual, yet they do not form a continuous procession. Their gestures remain separate, almost held within a duration that does not advance. The blue floral pattern passes through figures and intervals, absorbing ritual presence into the fabric’s ornament. Screen printing ink and acrylic do not entirely erase the preprinted weave, which resurfaces within the bodies and destabilises the distinction between painted image and support. The festival thus loses the substance of reportage and assumes the form of a memory that the fabric preserves while simultaneously dispersing it.

The work introduces into Zampogna’s research a contamination distinct from that between “real reality” and “media reality” developed in earlier cycles. Tradition itself is now subjected to interference. It is not opposed to contemporaneity, but made visible through a surface already charged with domestic and decorative signs. The ritual is neither celebrated as the recovery of an identity nor reduced to folklore. It persists as a fragile form of belonging, recognisable yet without a stable centre. What remains for the viewer is an image in which collective memory can appear only by accepting its own incompleteness.