Mowoso
Mowoso (in the Lingala language, “a rustling of leaves in the wind”) finds its roots in a project born in Kinshasa in the mid-1990s and which lasted ten years: Collectif GHETTO KOTA OKOLA (“Ghetto Enter Grow”). Founded by composer-musician-multimedia artist Bebson Elemba (BEBSON DE LA RUE) and his brother musician and film-maker DICOCO BOKETSHU, the leader of Mowoso, the Ghetto was a highly successful, grassroots experimental undertaking located in a family compound at the heart of Kinshasa’s toughest neighborhood, Ngbaka. It was a space of learning, exchange, confrontation and diffusion centered around forms of expression (music, dance, visual arts) born of a heady mix of multiple local, borrowed, reworked and ramped-up hip hop cultures. While it is based in the central neighborhood of Lingwala, like Ghetto Kota Okala Mowoso focuses most of its work in and around Ngbaka, a part of the city where “parralel” economic actors and deal-makers rub shoulders with gang members, shegue (homeless children), prostitutes and refugees hailing from other parts of the continent, the country and the city, who have been forced out of their homes by wars local and global that have affected DRC a…
Films