Catalogue > At random

Set against silent 16mm footage filmed by a French soldier in occupied Algeria, the film stages an encounter between colonial memory and the soundscape of contemporary warfare. As present-day militarism infiltrates the archive, time fractures and the images begin to echo with conflicts past and future. What emerges is a haunting meditation on the ways colonial violence continues to reverberate through today’s military imaginaries.

Marcel Mrejen (FR/DZ) born in 1994 (Paris, FR) is a visual artist and filmmaker exploring the articulation of technology within living and economic metabolisms. The form of his work spans various time-based media — installations, filmmaking, sound, and machine-learning. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2018, before being a resident of Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains from 2021 to 2023. His work has been exhibited/screened in various cultural institutions, including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), or the Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam). Parallel to his artistic practice, he co-curated the first edition of REFRESH: Future-Proof in 2021. His debut film Memories of an Unborn Sun was awarded Best Short Film at Visions du Réel in 2024 and was screened and won awards in numerous festivals around the world. In 2025, it was awarded the Scam Prize for Best Experimental Film. In collaboration with Eliott Déchamboux, his book: L’Europe c’est Deutshland quand tu rate laba tu est foutue mon frère, le reste c’est du fouma-fouma, was published by Jungle Books in 2019.