Tempi di Covid 8

Within the COVID series, sanitation becomes the paradox of a presence that, to protect shared space, must almost erase its own identity. Zampogna treats the gesture not as a mere document of the pandemic, but as the public form assumed by vulnerability: the body can act upon the world only after withdrawing from contact and recognisability. Lived reality and its media codification contaminate each other once again. An action made familiar through news coverage is isolated and turned into an emblem of a collective condition.

The white protective suit removes face and anatomy from view, reducing the worker to an anonymous function even as the movement of the arms preserves a sense of physical urgency. The device being held extends the body and organises the image along an operational diagonal, yet offers no certainty about the gesture’s effectiveness. What should eliminate danger primarily makes its invisible spread perceptible. The floral pattern of the fabric crosses the figure, the darker field and the surrounding space, preventing them from separating cleanly. Domestic ornament thus absorbs sanitary protocol and makes the scene fluctuate between habitable environment and contaminated surface, between painting and utilitarian textile.

Compared with Zampogna’s earlier media mythologies, the present appears here not through an advertising icon or a promise of fortune, but through a repeated procedure that regulated everyday experience. The work pushes the interchangeability of person and role to its limit: the individual disappears into the equipment, while the decoration preserves a normality that the action itself declares compromised. The result offers no consoling resolution. Care coincides with distance, protection with concealment, and shared space remains legible only as a place through which risk continues to circulate.