Like Hollywood’s maps to the stars’ homes but actually useful, Fallen Fruit‘s guides show Boulevards like Sunset and Santa Monica branching off onto smaller streets dotted with stars. Instead of ‘Cruise’, ‘Kidman’ et al, the legend in the corner lists Passionfruit, Nectarines, Lemons, Plums and something called a Loquat. Welcome to the world of fruit mapping, as pioneering by LA art stroke activist collective Fallen Fruit. We asked co-founder Matias Viegener all about fruit.

Vice: How did this fruit party get started?
Matias Viegener: We looked around our neighborhood (Silver Lake, in Los Angeles) and saw all these fruit trees that went unharvested. We thought about ways to not only talk about these trees, but to use them to get people to think about they city and how we live in it.

Was it hard finding enough fruit to make it worth it?
No, that’s just one of the things that characterizes the climate of Los Angeles, where there is fruit year round. Apples, avocados, peaches, plums, oranges, loquats, kumquats, etc. But we’ve learned every city has some fruit that grows really well, such as the apricot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For about two weeks, there are apricots everywhere, falling to the ground and going unused. And the amazing part is that most people in the neighborhood still drive to a market to buy fruit.

So who uses your maps?
Most are mid-20’s through mid-40’s but we also meet people from all ages, parents with kids and seniors too. We tend to get a lot of urban activists, handcrafters, bicyclers, and the eco-minded. One of our main goals is to get people who would never meet, much less talk, to engage in collaborative projects such as jam making together. The Public Fruit Jam is an event we hold two or three times a year, in which all the citizens are invited to meet at an art gallery or museum and make jam together.

Why fruit and not vegetables?
Historically fruit is a symbol of goodness. It is something that we have in common all around the world, in all cultures, and for all social classes and age groups. Fruit trees don’t ask for anything back, they just give and want to picked. We like fruit because it’s ordinary, but also very special. You might think of it as a natural object, but all fruit is a hybrid of nature and human intervention. In that way it’s collaborative, and just as much a form of culture as of nature. The preparation and sharing of food were our first forms of culture, one of the first ways we learned to cooperate and exchange rather than compete. Fruit is also the food that appears most often in art. Partly this is because of its symbolic power, a symbol of goodness, bounty and hospitality. But also because of its formal qualities of color, texture and shape. Fruit is beautiful.

What’s the craziest, most exotic fruit on the list?
Funny you should ask. We really want people to make public fruit maps to share (we’d put them online), but most people don’t seem to do this. So far the furthest we have mapped is Linz, Austria. More people have been posting on our platial map (platial.com/map/fallen-fruit/1727) and you can upload to the map on an iPhone. What has happened is a lot of grass roots local activity which we love. We have got emails about a city in Wisconsin that is changing their local city laws to allow public fruit tree planting, for example. There’s a huge movement afoot, one that asks all of us to treat the environment, the city we live in, and each other differently and better.

Do you see Fallen Fruit as part of the wider scavenging/punk/anti-waste movement?
We hope that Fallen Fruit is a lot of things. We are totally into freegan values, but we also believe the idea of scavenging could be viewed as sharing. 20th century culture is so much about waste and excess, but perhaps in the future it could be about resources.

What’s next in the world of fruit mapping?
We are going to Colombia next month to work on a new art project about bananas and the history of plantations – it’s really amazing how fruit intersects local history and global issues. You can find the most amazing narratives in fruit, for example how the banana got from New Guinea to Central America and Africa via the Islamic empires of the middle ages. It’s not just economics, but politics and culture at work. It’s political, but it’s also personal. Everyone has a story about fruit.

For more info and your own fruit map, visit fallenfruit.org

CHRIS HATHERILL