Union
2012

Digital Video

121 minutes

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Union is a film contemplating a journey documenting the project MONUMENTS & SHRINES TO CAPITALISM (2012 - 13) which proposes an artist-curatorial collaboration with 8 artists in 8 cities in Europe at the end of 2012, questioning ideas of consumption and power, protest and awakening, pilgrimage and fracture, architecture, monument and shrine reflecting a decay in western culture propelled by an addiction to capitalism. Commencing in Athens, a collaborative journey to Reykjavik via stops in many of the most significant cultural, political, historical and financial cities of Europe was embarked upon marking a cacophonous fault line from Southeast to Northwest Europe.

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 destabilization 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.