Tempi di Covid 16

Within the COVID series, the sanitisation of public space becomes a figure of distance, since the act of care coincides with the temporary erasure of all contact. Zampogna treats the health protocol not as a mere document of the pandemic, but as the form taken by collective experience when safety requires bodies, surfaces and presences to be kept apart. An ordinary action is thus removed from reportage and returned to the tension, central to his practice, between lived reality and public image: the work required to protect the community appears already translated into the recognisable repertoire of the emergency.

The protected figure, bent over the rod directed towards the ground, reduces the body to the executor of a protocol and concentrates the action on a space that must be made usable again. Identity remains secondary to function, while posture and equipment construct a presence that is both active and remote. The fabric’s geometric pattern absorbs setting and worker into an ornamental grid, turning the emergency into an order that is at once domestic and impersonal. Yet the repeated forms do not stabilise the scene: crossed by the figure and interrupted by the red area, they make the event shift between warning signal, decoration and an already schematised memory. The mixed media preserves the friction between these registers rather than reconciling them.

The work introduces a precise reversal into Zampogna’s reflection. While in the earlier media mythologies the present was contaminated by advertising, prizes and circulating images, here the protocol itself produces an immediately shared iconography. Sanitisation protects, but it also makes visible a world in which every surface is suspect and every proximity must be managed. Within the work’s small field, the drama does not erupt: it is ordered, repeated and almost incorporated into the fabric. This very defusing allows the pandemic’s more troubling condition to emerge, namely habituation to a reality in which care takes the form of separation.