Tempi di Covid 15

Within the COVID cycle, the work transforms everyday mobility under restrictions into an image of denied proximity, where protection and contact coexist without restoring a shared presence. Zampogna does not simply illustrate an episode from the pandemic. He subjects an ordinary scene to the same contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” that runs through his practice. The scooter journey, a gesture associated with freedom of movement and the body’s exposure in urban space, becomes a compressed form of collective experience: the two travel together, yet each face remains withheld from the other.

The two masked figures share the vehicle’s confined space, but the overlap of their bodies does not produce intimacy. It makes visible a closeness governed by separation. The face mask breaks the continuity between face, identity, and relationship, while the pale, discontinuous applications leave the bodies in an unstable condition, as if the scene were only provisionally held upon the surface. The fabric’s graphic pattern also passes through setting and figures, absorbing the contingent episode into a visual flow that weakens the distinction between lived experience and public image. The vehicle retains a certain material consistency, but its occupants appear more fragile, exposed to an erasure that does not coincide with immobility.

Unlike other images in the cycle, which focus on public roles or medical devices, this small scene measures the pandemic transformation through a common habit. The mixed media on fabric does not secure a document, but makes its legibility precarious: what might belong to urban reportage becomes the sign of a suspended sociality. The work thus brings the pandemic into Zampogna’s broader grammar, in which collective codes shape reality until it becomes inseparable from its representation. An unresolved contradiction remains: movement continues, while relationship is screened at the very moment of greatest physical proximity.