Fairy Fantastic! is a series of experimental, gender fluid folk and fairy tale films for queer kids of all ages.
Contact Us: info@fairyfantastic.org
Suzie Silver has been creating queer performance and video art for over two decades. Her well-known early videos, Freebird and A Spy were recently included in the “Histories of Sexuality” exhibition at the New Museum in New York City.
Hilary Harp was trained in sculpture at Parsons School of Design and Tyler School of Art and creates sculptures, installations and media projects which explore new hybrid forms and challenge categories of high and low, male and female, technology and craft.
Since 2003 Harp and Silver have collaborated on videos and mixed media installations that celebrate their shared love of science fiction, camp sensibilities and performance art. Their videos have screened at over one hundred festivals on five continents and are distributed by the Video Data Bank. Harp is Associate Professor of Sculpture at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Silver is Professor of Time-Based Media at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Learn more about us and our work at www.hilaryharp.com and www.suziesilver.com.
Fairy Fantastic! adapts traditional folk and fairy tales, to feature the broadest possible range of gender expressions and kinship bonds. Our first video, The Sausage, was begun in the summer of 2014, funded by a grant from Carnegie Mellon University’s Frank Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier, and was completed in January, 2015. On the one hand, the stories in “Fairy Fantastic” appear to be radical revisions of familiar tales, including alternative gender-presentations and kinship structures not usually associated with family programming. On the other hand, our stories seek to recuperate the raucous and rebellious bodily and utopian aspects of the traditional folk tale, which have sometimes been purged in puritanical body-loathing bourgeois interpretations.
Our means of production have always been decidedly DIY. Working with small budgets, using friends and students as performers, we practice a kind of opulent “cinema povera” in which magical effects are achieved with minimal means. In part this is an extension of our identification with “folk” culture. It is an approach greatly influenced by the early magic cinema master Georges Méliès. Hand-crafted, seams-showing illusions resulting from a combination of practical and digital special effects have been a hallmark of all of our projects. In the case of FF! this knit-together image is in sync with the themes of hybridity and metamorphosis, common to both folk/fairy tales and queer politics.
One key aim of queer cultural production is to replace a singular and repressive “normal” with a multiplicity of genders, sexualities and kinship bonds. Folk and fairy tales are an ideal vehicle for this intervention because their subjects: deep structural concepts, like wild vs domestic; male vs female; human vs non-human; are the same categories that LGBTQIA communities have sought to liberate from binary thinking.