Monument Valley
2002
Digital Video
12 minutes
Monument Valley (2002) is a twelve-minute video work that explores the uneasy relationship between landscape, ideology, and representation. Filmed as a single, continuous tracking shot through the iconic desert terrain of Monument Valley on the Arizona–Utah border, the work presents viewers with a landscape that is at once familiar and strangely estranged. Saturated reds and deep ochres transform the desert into an almost extraterrestrial environment, evoking otherworldly images as much as the American Southwest.
The camera moves slowly and deliberately, inviting a contemplative engagement with the monumental scenery. Yet this visual serenity is continually disrupted by an accompanying radio conversation whose increasingly hostile and politically charged content undermines any possibility of passive spectatorship.
The tension between image and sound forms the conceptual core of the work. While the landscape unfolds with hypnotic slowness, the disembodied voices heard over the soundtrack gradually reveal attitudes rooted in intolerance, paranoia, and ideological extremism. The conversation remains partially obscured, resisting complete comprehension, yet its aggressive undertones become increasingly apparent. This disjunction produces a profound sense of unease. The viewer is caught between the seductive beauty of the image and the disturbing implications of the spoken dialogue. Neither element fully explains the other, yet each fundamentally alters the way the other is experienced.
Mangion's work engages with a long history of landscape as a cultural and political construct. Monument Valley occupies a privileged position within the mythology of the American West. Through countless Hollywood Westerns, advertisements, and tourist imagery, it has become one of the most recognisable landscapes in the world. The desert mesas and vast horizons have come to signify ideas of freedom, expansion, individualism, and national identity. Yet these representations often obscure the violent histories embedded within the terrain itself. The mythology of the frontier depends upon the erasure of Indigenous histories and the normalisation of colonial occupation. The landscape appears empty only because its previous inhabitants have been systematically removed from dominant narratives.
By situating a hostile political conversation within this iconic setting, Monument Valley exposes the ideological foundations that frequently lie beneath seemingly neutral images of landscape. The work suggests that landscapes are never innocent. They are continually shaped by histories of power, conquest, and representation. The radio voices function as a contemporary echo of these historical processes, revealing how exclusionary and nationalist ideologies continue to circulate beneath the surface of everyday life.
The use of the radio broadcast is particularly significant because it introduces a space beyond the frame. While the image remains fixed on the monumental desert, the voices originate elsewhere, crossing state boundaries and geographical distance. The viewer becomes aware of multiple territories operating simultaneously: the physical landscape of Monument Valley, the political landscape invoked by the conversation, and the symbolic landscape constructed through decades of cultural representation. These spaces overlap without ever fully aligning, generating a productive instability at the heart of the work.
The video's formal restraint intensifies this effect. The absence of editing, narrative development, or visual interruption creates a sense of suspended time. The viewer is encouraged to inhabit the image rather than consume it. Yet this sustained looking gradually becomes uncomfortable. What initially appears tranquil begins to feel charged with latent tension. The landscape can no longer be approached as a passive spectacle because the soundtrack continually insists upon its political dimensions.
In this regard, Monument Valley operates as a critique of the power of images themselves. The work asks how certain landscapes become naturalised as symbols of national identity and how visual pleasure can obscure underlying structures of violence and exclusion. The desert's extraordinary beauty remains undeniable, but that beauty becomes inseparable from questions of history, ideology, and power. The viewer is compelled to recognise that aesthetic experience is never detached from the social and political conditions through which meaning is produced.
Perhaps most unsettling is the work's refusal to resolve the contradiction it establishes. The image and soundtrack never converge into a coherent narrative. Instead, they remain suspended in an uneasy coexistence. The landscape continues to mesmerise even as the conversation disturbs; the beauty of the image persists alongside the ugliness of the ideas it accompanies. It is precisely this unresolved tension that gives the work its critical force.
Ultimately, Monument Valley reveals the landscape not as a neutral backdrop but as an ideological space in which histories, myths, and political desires are continuously projected and contested. Through the collision of image and sound, Mangion transforms one of the most iconic landscapes of the American West into a site of critical reflection, exposing the fragile relationship between representation, memory, and power. What initially appears harmonious gradually becomes troubling, forcing viewers to reconsider not only what they are looking at, but also the cultural narratives that have taught them how to see.