The new exhibition by Elsa James – member of the Essex Girl Liberation Front – reckons with what it means to be a black person living in the county ⬇️
The new exhibition by the artist – and member of the Essex Girl Liberation Front – reckons with what it means to be a black person living in the county. She talks black history, the Jab Jab dance and claiming the mantra ‘Black Girl Essex’Hettie Judah is a writer, and chief art critic of The i Paper.
Despite her campaigning, and the work she was doing honouring black figures in the county’s history, James realised she was holding back from owning her own identity as an Essex Girl. She remembers attending the 2018 Women of the World festival at London’s Southbank Centre with the collective and feeling uneasy. After two decades in Essex, when friends from London asked where she was living she’d still repeat apologetic lines about moving to Southend for the schools.
The title work is a fantastical three-part film in which James performs to camera as figures representing the past, present and future of Black Girl Essex. In the first, filmed at the ancient Old Knobbley oak tree in Mistley, James assumes a role from an earlier generation of vilified women: one of those persecuted in the Essex Witch Trials at the turn of the 17th century. In the third, filmed beneath the M25 in Thurrock, she’s a gold-clad harbinger of the future.
Carnival is a formative part of James’s heritage: in west London, her father was a co-founder of a big steel band. “He grew up in a small island that’s part of the Grenada three-island state,” says James. “The French brought carnival to the Caribbean with them, but the enslaved people weren’t allowed to participate: you couldn’t dance, you couldn’t play music, unless it was approved. My name is James, because I’m named after whoever was in charge of my ancestors.
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