Fruit Tree Adoptions

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Plant fruit trees seedlings in various urban contexts

Initiator(s)

Fallen Fruit

Description

Fruit Tree Adoptions is project created in collaboration with donors, civic groups and organisations like Treepeople in Los Angeles and San Diego (CA). This work proposes to plant fruit trees seedlings in various urban contexts – both public spaces or on the peripheries of private property. Each recipient signs an adoption form that promises to care for the tree, initiating a relationship with it. This project aims to develop new forms of community life based on generosity and sharing. The work was moreover recalibrated in a kind of performance to engage individuals and also to put the focus onto the fabric of the neighbourhood.

Goals

The core of Fallen Fruit’s work is social, finding ways to get strangers to develop relationships and to create new consciousness about public space and social collaboration. Neighbourhoods change over the years to become both greener and more social and cooperative; fruit trees are not a silver bullet to urban problems, but they are a uniquely playful glue towards a more inclusive social fabric.

Beneficial outcomes

In 2010 the most successful Fruit Tree Adoption at the Watts Towers Community Arts Center was organised. The director of the centre was scared to work in the neighbourhood of Watts, because she reminded us that it was an historically oppressed neighbourhood, where residents were more involved in more in violence than with developing a culture based on sharing. The event went on and at the end of it, every single resident was agreed to plant a tree.

Location

United States

Users

Buurtgroepen, vaak geholpen door kunstinstellingen zoals het Watts Towers Arts Center of Machine Project in Los Angeles.

Maintained by

Fallen Fruit (Gevallen Fruit) – een samenwerking tussen David Burns, Matias Viegener en Austin Young

Duration

2007 - ongoing

Category

Scientific
Pedagogical
Politics
Urban Development
Economy
Environment
Social

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