Union
2012
Digital Video
23 minutes
Union is a filmic meditation on movement through a continent in crisis. Conceived as a documentary reflection on the project Monuments & Shrines to Capitalism (2012–13), the work follows a journey across Europe at a moment when the promises underpinning the European project appeared increasingly fragile. Developed through collaborations with eight artists in eight cities, the project traced a route from Athens to Reykjavík, traversing many of Europe's most significant political, financial, historical, and cultural centres. The resulting film transforms this geographical passage into a critical exploration of power, consumption, protest, memory, and the ideological structures that continue to shape contemporary Europe.
The journey began in Athens, a city that by 2012 had become emblematic of the European debt crisis and the social consequences of neoliberal economic policies. From there, the route followed a symbolic trajectory across the continent, moving from Southeast to Northwest Europe along what might be understood as a fault line of contemporary capitalism. The cities encountered along the way were not selected merely for their geographical significance but for their relationship to systems of political authority, economic power, cultural production, and social resistance. Together they formed a fragmented portrait of a continent struggling to reconcile its democratic ideals with the realities of economic inequality, financial dependency, and institutional disillusionment.
At the centre of the project lies the notion of the monument. Traditionally, monuments function as sites through which societies commemorate collective achievements, victories, and foundational myths. They materialise systems of value and transform ideology into physical form. Yet Union asks what kinds of monuments emerge when capitalism itself becomes the dominant organising principle of social life. What are the architectural symbols of contemporary power? Where are the shrines through which economic belief systems are performed and maintained? And how might these sites reveal the contradictions embedded within contemporary European society?
The title itself is layered with ambiguity. "Union" refers simultaneously to political unity, economic integration, collective identity, and the increasingly strained concept of the European Union. Yet the film repeatedly encounters evidence of fragmentation rather than cohesion. Financial centres stand alongside sites of protest. Grand civic architecture coexists with signs of abandonment and social unrest. The institutions that once embodied stability appear increasingly precarious. What emerges is a portrait of Europe not as a coherent political entity but as a space marked by competing narratives, uneven development, and profound ideological tension.
The project's emphasis on pilgrimage is particularly significant. Historically, pilgrimage has been associated with journeys undertaken in search of spiritual meaning. In Union, however, the pilgrimage is redirected towards the secular temples of contemporary capitalism. Financial districts, corporate headquarters, stock exchanges, governmental institutions, and centres of consumption emerge as the new sacred sites of a global economic order. The journey reveals how capitalism generates its own rituals, architectures, and systems of belief, producing spaces that command reverence while often remaining insulated from democratic scrutiny.
At the same time, the film documents moments of resistance that challenge these structures.
Public demonstrations, occupations, informal interventions, and traces of collective dissent punctuate the journey. These encounters reveal a Europe in which competing visions of the future are being actively contested. The project unfolds in the shadow of the Occupy movement, anti-austerity protests, and widespread public dissatisfaction with political and economic institutions. As a result, the landscapes encountered are never neutral. Every square, street, monument, and financial district becomes charged with the possibility of both domination and resistance.
The collaborative nature of Monuments & Shrines to Capitalism is crucial to understanding the film's methodology. Rather than imposing a singular perspective upon the continent, the project assembles a constellation of local viewpoints and artistic responses. Each city becomes a lens through which broader questions can be examined, creating a dispersed and polyphonic portrait of Europe. The resulting work resists definitive conclusions, instead foregrounding complexity, contradiction, and multiplicity.
Visually, Union presents Europe as a landscape of accumulated histories and overlapping temporalities. Architectural monuments stand as reminders of past empires, revolutions, and political aspirations, while contemporary financial infrastructures point towards new configurations of power. Throughout the film, these temporal layers intersect and collide. The grandeur of historic institutions is repeatedly measured against signs of contemporary instability, suggesting that the narratives upon which European identity has traditionally been constructed are increasingly under strain.
Underlying the entire project is a broader inquiry into cultural exhaustion. The film proposes that Western culture has become profoundly shaped by an addiction to capitalist expansion, consumption, and growth. This addiction manifests not only through economic systems but also through the built environment, public space, and collective imagination. The monuments encountered throughout the journey become symptoms of this condition, revealing both the achievements and failures of a civilisation increasingly defined by market logic.
Yet Union is not simply a critique of capitalism. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the symbolic and psychological structures through which contemporary power operates. By moving across borders and through diverse political contexts, the film exposes both the reach and the fragility of these systems. What emerges is a continent suspended between integration and disintegration, prosperity and precarity, memory and uncertainty.
Ultimately, Union functions as both document and allegory. The journey from Athens to Reykjavík maps not only a geographical route but also an ideological landscape marked by fracture, aspiration, and contradiction. Through the intertwined themes of monumentality, pilgrimage, protest, and power, the film offers a compelling reflection on Europe at a critical historical moment. In tracing the shrines of contemporary capitalism, Mangion reveals a continent confronting the limits of its own narratives, searching for meaning amidst the ruins and promises of its economic and political order.
Questioning capitalist monoliths, a series of one-day projects were created engaging with public spaces and social environments. Working with deliberately low production values in various media, these public interventions sought contrasting interactions with various elements of these cities resulting in a temporal destabilisation of an urban fabric and community.
Parallel Borders is an itinerant artist / curatorial project created by Mark Mangion for Malta Contemporary Art. A series of year-long collaborations was initiated in 2012, generating a discourse with a diversity of artists and practitioners from other fields invited to contribute to an explorative platform of site-specific fieldwork in various regions around the world, questioning ideas of cross-field dialogue through visual culture. An ambitious, epic global journey will be embarked upon, creating a foundation for historical study and anthropological mapping, storytelling and geo-political cultural examination against a backdrop of a deflating capitalism, environmental instability, technological revolution and ideas and disputes of borders; physical, territorial, scientific, philosophical.
This network of collaborators are invited to collectively question and respond to specific geopolitical thematic trajectories culminating in a series of texts, films, events, photographs, sound works, drawings, collected and constructed objects, cyber spaces, performances, actions, workshops and gatherings, architectural and digital models and other. In each project the selected collaborators re-examine the parameters, patterns and crossovers of their own individual field of research within a group dynamic and connected to place, time and culture.