Fractured Unions
2007
This series of drawings emerges from a process of reduction and transformation applied to the visual language of African national flags. Through acts of extraction, distortion, and simplification, Mark Mangion isolates fragments of these highly charged symbols, removing them from their original function as markers of nationhood and collective identity. What remains are sparse and often fragile compositions in which stars, colours, geometric forms, and emblems persist as traces of larger political narratives.
National flags operate as condensed ideological objects. They embody histories of liberation, anti-colonial struggle, state formation, unity, and aspiration. Across the African continent, many flags emerged from moments of independence and collective optimism, carrying within them the visual language of self-determination and political emancipation. Mangion's drawings neither celebrate nor reject these histories. Instead, they subject them to a process of fragmentation that reveals the distance between political symbolism and lived reality.
Reduced to delicate arrangements on largely empty surfaces, the flags appear suspended between presence and disappearance. Their forms become uncertain, detached from the certainty and authority that national symbols traditionally seek to project. The resulting images oscillate between abstraction and recognition, inviting viewers to reconstruct meaning from incomplete visual information. In doing so, the works question how identity is formed through symbols and how those symbols endure, transform, or erode over time.
The substantial white space surrounding each fragment plays a critical role. It introduces silence, absence, and vulnerability into images typically associated with confidence and sovereignty. The flags no longer function as declarations of power but as remnants—echoes of historical ambitions, political promises, and collective dreams. Their reduction suggests both loss and possibility, opening a space in which fixed notions of nationhood can be reconsidered.
At a moment when borders, migration, sovereignty, and postcolonial identities remain subjects of intense debate, these drawings propose a quieter reflection on the symbolic structures that continue to shape contemporary political consciousness. By dismantling and reconfiguring the flag, Mangion transforms an emblem of certainty into a field of ambiguity, revealing nationhood not as a fixed condition but as an ongoing and unresolved project.
The works ultimately occupy a space between memory and critique, between belonging and displacement. They ask what remains when the authority of the symbol is stripped away, and whether new forms of solidarity might emerge from the fragments left behind.