Fallen Fruit (David Burns y Austin Young)

Fallen Fruit is an artistic collaboration initially conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the partnership. Attracted by the relationship between public space, citizenship, and fruit, Fallen Fruit is based in Los Angeles, USA, but its interventions are developed internationally, focusing particularly on Latin America. The work Los Bananeros (The Banana Workers) is part of the interdisciplinary banana project Colonial History of Fruit developed by Fallen Fruit during an artist residency in Cali, Colombia. 

Los Bananeros (The Banana Workers) is a set of nine large-format photographs of a banana plantation in northern Colombia, set against nine portraits of workers on the same plantation. In the original installation in Cali, a second gallery housed two looped videos placed face to face; one showed the workers cutting, washing, and packing bananas for shipment, and the other one portrayed a group of American teenagers eating bananas on an endless loop. A collection of video interviews with Colombian historians, activists, and citizens completed the installation. This piece examined the footprint of the United Fruit Company in today’s Colombia, seeking to establish connections between realities that rarely intersect to trace a localized and subjective narrative of the forms of colonialism currently existing.