Dorine Mokha (1989 - 2021) has tragically passed away on the 8th of January 2021. He was developing a new performance and video work as part of On-Trade-Off. We, the OTO collective, will work to keep his legacy alive within the project and will include Dorine’s works in future exhibitions.

Dorine Mokha (1989-2021, based in Lubumbashi, DRC): Dorine was a Congolese dancer, choreographer and author, artistic co-director of ART’gument Project in Lubumbashi and associated artist with Studios Kabako in Kisangani. Open to multidisciplinarity, he has participated in numerous workshops in theatrical improvisation, film initiation, theatre writing, project writing and more recently in visual criticism and artistic production. He participated in international programs such as the Pan-African PAMOJA Residencies (2013-2015), the TURN Fund Meeting (2014), the Berlin Platform – Goethe Institute Coproduction Fund (2018); Avignon Festival, the Ruhrtriennale, the Theater der Welt or the Theaterformen. Scholar 2014-2015 of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Laureate 2016 of the Triennial Dance Dance of Africa Dance of the French Institute, Jury 2017 of the Zurcher Kontal Bank Prize or Laureate 2019 of the Pro Helvetia Research Residence. 

“Congo’s resources are exported to feed the industries all over the world since colonialism. My performance imagines the day when the artists will wake up from the virus of oblivion: We will then assemble our memories and start to tell the story differently.” (Dorine Mokha)

(Dis)-Charged, Dorine Mokha (unrealised)

(Dis)-Charged, a two-fold performance would have been developed in Congo and Belgium in collaboration with dancers, musicians, and the opera singer Serge Kakudji. 

(Dis)-Charged was a utopian science fiction in two chapters responding to economic inequalities relating to extractivism, that is based on the operative mode of a battery: Charged would have been composed in Lubumbashi, where the performers would interact with the material vestiges of the copper wire car Tesla Crash (sculpture by Jean Katambayi, Daddi Tshikaya and Sammy Baloji) and engage with the audience in call-and-response exchanges. The speculative counter-narrative Discharged would then have been choreographed in Europe and would have included footage from the first part.