A durational performance, a ritual, and an invitation, MOKITA is mourning in motion. Exploring grief, and the complex emotions arising from, but not limited to, environmental collapse, MOKITA is a participatory, immersive and meditative experience where attendees are invited to submit their grieving to the space in the form of a ball of clay shaped by their hand and embedded with their sentiment, wherein the artists will carry the clay through an intuitive and secular ritual process in order to create a space for transmutation and sensing of melancholy, rage or grief.
Performed over eight hours for approximately 120 participants by Luna Mrozik-Gawler, Nithya Iyer and Devika Bilimoria, accompanied by sound art by Amy Hanley, and supported by the participant facilitation of Nardine Keriakous, MOKITA considers the global, environmental and personal grief arising from the urgent and distressing circumstances that we are surrounded by everyday.
A Kilivila word from Papua New Guinea, meaning ‘the truth we all know, and have agreed not to talk about,’ MOKITA is a performance work that seeks to create a space dedicated to grieving, and asks how we maintain our humanity amongst a time of rapid destruction and change.
After being carried through the ritual, each grief was planted with native seed in the soil surrounding Birdlands Reserve in Belgrave Heights.
In this way our grief, individual or collective, small or insurmountable, will be offered back to land as a contribution towards ongoing revegetation of the site.
NITHYA IYER 