Tempi di Covid 3

Within the «COVID» series, the work transforms the individual subjected to pandemic protocols into a souvenir of suspended normality, fixing collective experience in an image that is both domestic and impersonal. Zampogna does not isolate a news event, but condenses a new public condition of the body: being recognisable through what protects it, restricts it and regulates its appearance. The figure thus becomes the figurative residue of a time when gestures, distances and medical devices acquired the value of shared codes. The familiar contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” shifts here from the circulation of images to the daily discipline of presence.

The face mask and rectangular device worn on the chest compress face and torso within a system of protection and identification, reducing the individual to a public function without entirely erasing vulnerability. The large raised white element remains semantically unstable and, for that very reason, turns the gesture into a formula that is difficult to decipher, poised between signal, offering and demonstration. Beneath the feet, the red oval base removes the body from any inhabitable space and presents it as a small effigy to be preserved. The pale fabric, crossed by blue vegetal motifs, completes this displacement: rather than placing the figure in an environment, it absorbs it into an ornamental order that makes the emergency compatible with the domestic interior.

The work therefore introduces a particular form of defused drama into the series, structurally related, though not in subject, to that of the «Butchers»: the trauma does not disappear, but is made manageable, repeatable and almost collectible. Here the souvenir preserves not the memory of a journey, but that of a shared restriction already poised to become a period image. The result is an unresolved tension between testimony and consumption: what concretely disciplined bodies survives as a visual object, while the person remains trapped in the role assigned by that time.