Tempi di Covid 14

The work transforms delivery during the pandemic into an image of denied proximity, in which the necessary gesture of exchange coincides with the impossibility of contact. Within the COVID series, Zampogna treats the health emergency not simply as a subject of current events, but as a device that alters relationships, roles, and their public visibility. The transfer of an object between a delivery worker and a masked figure brings ordinary life into the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” that runs through his research: an everyday episode appears already organised according to the impersonal codes of the news image.

The package held between the two figures concentrates the exchange in an uncertain area, turning delivery into a suspended rather than completed gesture. The bodies draw close, but the mask, visor, and protective clothing convert proximity into a system of precautions in which each person first encounters the social function of the other. The warning yellow and blue of the clothing emerge against the support’s vegetal design, assimilating protection, body, and environment into overlapping visual registers. The fabric therefore does not receive an intact scene: it allows the ornamental pattern to interfere with the figures and weaken the distinction between document, painting, and decoration. The broad vertical ochre band, which has no certain narrative function, also acts as a caesura that removes depth from the episode and exposes it as a fragment.

The pandemic thus becomes a perceptual condition even before it becomes a historical event. Compared with Zampogna’s earlier media mythologies, it is not an advertising promise that abstracts experience here, but a safety protocol that preserves bodies by separating them. The work registers this contradiction without resolving it: care passes through distance, service through a barrier, and relationship through accessories that make individuals recognisable primarily by the task they perform. What remains before the viewer is an everyday life that still functions, but has been deprived of the naturalness of its own gesture.