FALLEN FRUIT COLLECTIVE "Public Fruit Maps & The Lonliest Fruit in the World" / Exhibition

May 16, 2013
Art|Sci Gallery
CNSI 5th floor

Fallen Fruit presents a set of their Public Fruit Maps paired with their 2010 video, “The Loneliest Fruit in the World.” The maps are one of the collaboration’s signature projects: mapping all the fruit trees that grow in or over public space in neighborhoods around the world to which they are invited. The maps are hand-drawn and distributed free of copyright; they serve as guides for foraging but more importantly as visionary representations of what we hope to see: alternative urban spaces that engender new forms of sharing and thereby create new public experiences. “The Loneliest Fruit in the World” addresses a different kind of public fruit, berries that grow wild in the Arctic. The lingonberry, the salmonberry and the blueberry grow without any human involvement, and for a few short weeks become the site of intense activity as people flock to pick them on all public land. Shot in a residency in Tromsø, Norway, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, the video follows a group of Norwegians through a beautiful, spare landscape; while picking, they negotiate the relation between solitude, gleaning and company.

ARTIST BIO: Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects, site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. From participatory performances such as Public Fruit Jams and Fruit Meditations, to ongoing indexical work such as Public Fruit Maps and curated exhibitions that reorganize the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing their collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject, the three artists of Fallen Fruit — David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young — deploy fruit as a lens through which to see the world.