Strange Fruits

Mimma Scarpini

Strange Fruits evokes the long history of lynching in the United States as a form of extreme violence upon members of the African American community. It is an abstract work featuring an obscure object, revolving on itself and hanging from above like a fruit — a strange fruit — and as in the song, as a metaphor for a lynching.

Like in Holiday's work, the sublimation of this historical trauma into a symbolic rendering by Scarpini facilitates the re-inscription of this historical trauma in a deceptively simple and lyrical form that facilitates memory instead of erasure.