Catalogue > At random

The film was shot on location in Kilamba Kiaxi, a new underpopulated city outside Luanda, Angola built by Chinese construction company CITIC and financed by Hong Kong-based China International Fund. The film follows a young municipal worker who lives by night in the old city centre of Luanda and works by day as a groundskeeper at the new city of Kilamba Kiaxi far away.

Michael MacGarry is a multi-award winning visual artist and filmmaker, having exhibited internationally for ten years including TATE Modern, Guggenheim Bilbao, 19th VideoBrasil, 62nd Short Film Festival Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Les Rencontres Internationales. He holds an MFA from the University of the Witwatersrand (2004). MacGarry has been researching narratives and histories of socio-economics, politics, forms and objects within the context of contemporary Africa for over a decade. Frequently focused on marking key registers of modernism – MacGarry creates sculptures, films, installations and photographs which look at the contextual specifics of things and their place; how they are simultaneously distributed both as ideas and as objects in the world. His sculptural work is formed through processes of grafting and mutation, to produce fictional hybrids principally designed to question systemic paradigms: sovereign nationality; logics of making and meaning; power relations; notions of value, equity and progress as well as the relationship between industrial technology and African resources. In his filmmaking and photographic work these macro concerns often take the form of micro narratives, personal memory and subtle identity politics in spaces where contemporary life is in a state of invention and flux.