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 Public Fruit Maps has been done by the collective in many cities. This version is part of the interdisciplinary banana project Colonial History of Fruit developed by Fallen Fruit during an artist residency in Cali, Colombia. 

This version of Public Fruit mapped ‘public’ fruit, accessible in public spaces or hanging from fruit trees over public spaces, in the neighborhoods of Miraflores, Parque del Perro, and San Fernando in Cali, Colombia. The maps were hand-drawn and distributed royalty-free in JPG and PDF format so they could be reproduced without the artists’ permission or copyright costs. Public Fruit Maps aims to reconnect people with the context in which they live, discovering nature in urban spaces and re-imagining the relationship with the land. The piece also reconfigures the relationships between those with the most and fewest resources by proposing new understandings of property and the collective. Made as part of the Colonial History of Fruit project, this work also reflected on the legacy of the United Fruit Company in Colombia by drawing attention to the ubiquity of bananas in the country and the traumatic memory of their cultivation.