Fallen Fruit (David Burns and Austin Young)

Fallen Fruit is a collaborative art project that began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property. Fallen Fruit uses cartography and geography as an indexical platform to generate serialized and site-specific works of art that often embrace public participation. The work of Fallen Fruit includes photographic portraits, experimental documentary videos, public art installations, and curatorial projects. Using fruit as a method of reframing the familiar, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood, and new forms of citizenship. From protests to proposals for new urban green space, Fallen Fruit’s work aims to reconfigure the relationship of sharing and explore understandings of public and private, as well as real world and real time. We consider fruit to be many things; it’s a subject and object at the same time it is aesthetic. Fruit often triggers a childhood memory; it’s emotional and familiar. Everyone is an expert on the flavor of a banana. Much of this work is linked to ideas of place and family, and much of these works echo a sense of connectedness with something very primal – our capacity to share with others. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work.