Fallen Fruit is the result of an artistic collaboration begun in Los Angeles in 2004 between David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued to work on the project together. Fallen Fruit’s first initiative was to map all the fruit trees growing on the public land of Los Angeles. Later, the collaboration between the two grew to include serial public art projects, site-specific installations and happenings in cities throughout the world. Working in photographs, videos, and wallpaper, David and Austin always use with fruit as a material or artistic means; their practice aspires to re-imagine the ways we interact with public space, especially in urban areas, such as the community dynamics of a city and our direct experience of news events.
Theatre of the Sun (2018)
Mixed media
Like culture, fruit moves along routes of territorial expansion, international trade, and migrations: seeds travel across the globe. Fruit is a natural subject, but also a cultural and at times even ‘political’ one.
Theatre of the Sun is composed of an immersive installation made of wallpaper and the Public Fruit Map of Palermo, which shows the location of hundreds of fruit trees in the city’s public and private spaces, trees that are quite often entirely neglected and ignored. The maps are free and, like the fruit, they become a shared resource. The Public Fruit Map of Palermo is part of Endless Orchard, an expanding, global project which seeks to map the presence of edible fruit in cities throughout the world, offering a contemporary reflection on the theme of public spaces, which preserve local history and at the same time are constantly changing.