Tempi di Covid 10

Within the COVID series, the work measures how little remains of authority when its signs must coexist with health protocols, turning rank into a public image exposed to the same vulnerability as every body. Zampogna does not simply oppose religious power and biological fragility, but forces them to occupy the same figure. The cardinal thus becomes the point where an institutional function, constructed through a centuries-old code of garments and insignia, encounters the shared condition of the pandemic. The contamination between “real reality” and “media reality”, central to the artist’s research, operates here as a crisis of public representation: what should make rank immediately legible can no longer separate it from the medicalized present.

The face mask interrupts the symbolic continuity between face and cardinal’s robes, subordinating individual recognizability to a common, anonymous, regulatory device. The zucchetto, red sash and pectoral cross preserve the grammar of authority, but its efficacy appears reduced to a set of signs that remain visible yet have become insufficient. The green fabric also works against the portrait’s stability: its weave emerges through the field and, together with the blur that erodes the edges of the vestment, absorbs the figure into an uncertain surface. The body does not fully assert itself against the ground, but oscillates between portrait, ceremonial hanging and media apparition. The brown oval supporting it restores no concrete space; it isolates the figure like an image cut out and returned to circulation.

The work brings into the pandemic present a recurring procedure in Zampogna’s practice: the appropriation of a public identity in order to reveal its dependence on the codes that make it recognizable. Here the mask does not erase rank, but tests its limit. Ceremonial dignity survives while losing its capacity to guarantee distance and invulnerability. The result is only an apparent defusing of drama: the image remains composed, almost official, yet this very composure makes the equivalence between authority and the exposed body more grave. The cardinal does not merely represent an institution during Covid-19; he registers the moment when every form of distinction must negotiate its visibility with a collective sign of danger.