Volontari curatori di aiuole

Volunteer care for greenery becomes a problem of visibility: the vegetation printed on the fabric surrounds the bodies tending the flowerbed and unsettles the boundary between a concrete act and its image. In the Contemporary Interferences series, Zampogna no longer confines the contamination of “real reality” and “media reality” to the encounter between images from different sources. Interference operates within the very surface that should accommodate the scene. The title assigns the figures a shared task, but the painting does not allow that task to separate from the decorative vocabulary through which we see it. Tending plants thus meets vegetation already available as a pattern, removed from the time and effort of growth.

The figure bent towards the watering can gives the work a specific gesture, while the standing figure holds its outcome in a presence less clearly defined by action. This difference prevents the two people from being read simply as repetitions of the same role. Meanwhile, the fabric's vegetal design crosses the lighter clothing and softens its outlines: those caring for greenery risk being absorbed into its representation. The repeating pattern does not describe the flowerbed where the figures work. Instead, it extends an ornamental order across the whole image, without clearly distinguishing the space of human intervention from that of the support. Even the bodies' visibility seems to depend on what surrounds them.

Compared with earlier superimpositions of advertising fragments and figures, mediation here need not appear as a foreign image. The vegetal pattern itself destabilises what the title names clearly: a concrete activity carried out by people. The two anonymous figures come from a photograph taken by the artist. The work neither denies that labour nor reduces it to a metaphor. It leaves open a gap between care, which demands attention to something living, and a surface that can reproduce greenery without cultivating it. Within that gap, interference also concerns how we recognise a shared action when the image tends to turn it into decoration.