‘To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads.’

Gloria Anzaldúa

 

#strangefruit is a hybrid creature. A combination of poetry and prose. Visuals and soundscape. Autobiography and mythology. By defying definition, it instead lives at the crossroads. To paraphrase the author and scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa, in breaking down the boundaries between art and writing, social media and publishing, I am attempting to transcend both and give birth to a new form. A new reality. 

 

Originally written to exist in Instagram’s Stories, I used what is normally a frenetic snapshot into other people’s lives to create a longer, broader glimpse into a private world. Hashtags become signposts to what’s not being said. Visuals highlight what is happening between the lines. The score, a current to sweep the viewer up into this other world. 

 

Set against a backdrop of my own family’s folklore as well as African American mythology and the real life tragedy of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, #strangefruit is a story of love and loss in the Age of the Apps. 

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PRAISE FOR #STRANGEFRUIT

“Queer stories, much like queer lives, require reinvention, not only of content but of form, approaching the reality of our non-normative

experiences with wildly disruptive ways of telling. Jason Ford’s wonderfully excoriating #strangefruit does just that. It is perfectly and

unsettlingly contemporary.”

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- Jonathan Kemp

author of London Triptych

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