Jab Jab Essex. 2022
Duration: 8:11 minutes
This dense, rhythmic sound work for the moving-image A Jab Jab Awakening Towards A New Essex, engages the body as a site of resistance, inversion, and refusal. Built through layered sonic fragments and drum repetition, the work channels carnivalesque as both ritual and rupture, in which performance becomes a strategy for confronting historical violence. Rooted in diasporic memory and ancestral echo, Jab Jab moves between celebration and critique, invoking the devil figure not as spectacle, but as a subversive presence. Through sound, it unsettles dominant narratives, reanimating cultural forms shaped by colonial encounter and transforming them into acts of liberation and embodied memory.
Commissioned by Focal Point Gallery as part of the solo exhibition Othered in a region that has been historically Othered, 2022. Funded by Arts Council England, Focal Point Gallery and Southend-on-Sea City Council.
Credits: Conceived by Elsa James with Drums from Ken Lawrence and Conch Shell by Niles Hailstones. Designed and shaped by Trevor Mathison; Film stills: Andy Delaney
Elsa James © 2026. All Rights Reserved.