Tempi di Covid 7

In COVID, bodily protection becomes a form of exposure: what should separate the individual from the environment ultimately delivers the person to the impersonal pattern of the public image. The cycle approaches the pandemic not as a repertoire of episodes to illustrate, but as a condition that alters the visibility of bodies and their relationship with shared space. Zampogna returns here to the contamination between “real reality” and “media reality” that runs through his practice: the medical experience appears already translated into posture, clothing and immediately recognisable signs, while the person recedes behind the function assigned by the image.

The masked figure in protective clothing retains the movement and gesture of an ordinary action, but the face’s reduced definition shifts identity from the individual to the protocol that makes the figure legible. Protection does not construct an intact barrier. Instead, the green and whitish tones leave the body permeable to the support, as though the equipment intended to preserve it hastened its transformation into surface. The geometric and floral pattern of the fabric passes uninterrupted through space and figure, absorbing the emergency into a decorative continuity that tempers its drama. Mixed media thus keeps painted presence and preprinted textile in tension: neither dominates the other, and together they produce a vision in which danger already appears normalised.

The work introduces into the cycle a defusing comparable in structure to that of Butchers, but applies it to the public management of vulnerability. It is not explicit violence that is made consumable, but the daily discipline of emergency, transformed into a repeatable visual code. With its domestic and ornamental associations, the fabric brings collective trauma into an apparently inhabitable setting, while the mask prevents the figure from becoming a portrait again. What remains is a presence suspended among individual, function and circulating image. In this indeterminacy, the pandemic becomes a test of how the media do not merely document reality, but provide it with forms capable of absorbing its urgency.