Mkokoteni is a meditation on the transnational journey between two worlds—Kenya and Germany. The title refers to the mkokoteni, a hand-pulled cart used in Kenya’s informal transport economy, which serves as a metaphor for both labor and resilience. In this work, the cart symbolizes Jordan Rita Seruya Awori's (JRSA) own diasporic journey, carrying the weight of history, identity, and belonging across vast distances.

Through this short collage film, JRSA explores the intimate tension between home and diaspora, land and memory, reflecting on what it means to be connected to two places—Kenya, the birthplace, and Germany, the new home. Unlike traditional narratives of migration, which often focus on the relationship between people and their communities, JRSAchooses to connect with the land itself. The film delves into the sensory experiences that shape JRSA's connection to Kenya—the tactile textures, the familiar smells, and sounds—that continue to resonate, even in a foreign landscape. This journey is not one of displacement but of reknowing—a search for continuity through the senses, where the land itself remains a constant, carrying memory and history.

In this space of diaspora, where home becomes both a memory and a myth, the mkokoteni serves as a mode of transport not just for physical belongings, but for the fragments of identity, culture, and belonging that are often scattered or erased. Laden with these elements, the cart moves steadily forward, embodying a form of reparative justice—a reclamation of self and land, even as both become foreign over time. Mkokoteni speaks to the complex, often contradictory nature of belonging in the modern world: the ways in which JRSA carries histories, even as those histories shift, reconfigure, and reinvent themselves across borders.

This film becomes a form of life-writing for JRSA—a visual diary of reconnection and transformation, an act of reckoning with the past, and an exploration of how new roots are forged in shifting terrains. It reflects on what it means to belong to the land, and what happens when that land is no longer fixed, but constantly in motion—just as the mkokoteni rolls forward, ever in transit, ever in search of home.