LAist Interview: Matias Viegener of the Fallen Fruit Project

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Spring is less than 7 days away. What better way to greet the new season's arrival than to focus on the Fallen Fruit Project, which distributes maps of places where people can pick free fruit throughout Los Angeles. The collective also hosts foraging sorties. You can check their website for info on upcoming sorties and maps.

Dave Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young started the organization as an art project for "The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest" last year. Taking advantage of a California law that identifies overhanging fruit as public property, the comrades created free maps, distributed online and via flyers left in cafes, showing the locations of all the public fruit in their Silverlake neighborhood. Fallen Fruit now has maps for finding fruit in Hollywood, Koreatown, and Echo Park. The project encourages people to harvest and plant public fruit as well as provides new ways to look at one's neighborhood. This quirky experiment in grassroots community activism has attracted attention from the pressand urban theorists.

LAist will publish consecutive interviews with each Fallen Fruit founder over the next 3 days. We start with Matias Viegener who is a writer and critic living in Los Angeles. Mathias teaches at CalArts's School of Critical Studies. He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles' The Trial of Gilles de Rais. He has most recently published fiction and criticism in Bomb, Artforum, Art Issues, Artweek, Afterimage, Cargo, Critical Quarterly, High Performance, Framework, Oversight, American Book Review, Jacaranda Review, Fiction International, Paragraph, Semiotext(e) and X-tra.

Age and Occupation:
42, Writer & College Professor

How long have you lived in Los Angeles, and which neighborhood do you live in?:
Since 1984. I live in Silver Lake, but have lived in Venice, Koreatown, Fairfax and Manhattan Beach.

Why do you live in Los Angeles?
Potential. There is an openness & potentiality to this city that lets you make it into what you want it to be. It is malleable in the best way.

What inspired you to create the Fallen Fruit project?
First we simply wanted to map our neighborhood for what we called 'public fruit,' which is any fruit that overhangs sidewalks, parking lots or streets.

What surprised you about Angelenos when you got into this project?
To watch people exploring their own neighborhoods and seeing them from a totally different angle. Angelenos drive too much and unless you have a dog or ride a bike, you're not generally very connected to your community.

How do neighbors react when you start picking fruit from common areas in the neighborhoods that you map?
We've met many people doing this, and we've never had a bad reaction. Most people with fruit trees on their perimeter don't harvest them at all, or have far too much fruit. They welcomed us! We try never to put anyone on a fruit map without their ok. Fruit that goes unharvested is actually a menace, since it attracts animals and rodents.

Is Los Angeles a good place to be an urban forager?
The same thing that makes LA a problem for people with allergies (the great variety of things that grow here) also makes it a huge potential fruit basket. There's a greater range of fruit that will grow here, and yield year-round, than almost anywhere in the US.

What skills do you need to be a successful urban forager?
An open heart, a propensity to share and a dislike of hoarding.

What do you want participants in the Fallen Fruit project to get out of the experience?
Ideally, a sense that our city is always in flux, and that we singly and collectively have the power to change not just the landscape but the fabric of social life here. In the end this project is a political one. We actually care less about fruit than about the urban life & future of this city. There is a growing division between the haves and the have nots, and we want to think about the relationship between those who have resources and those who don't.

Do you have fruit maps of the following neighborhoods: Silverlake, Hollywood and Koreatown? How do you view now that you've created this project?
Originally we hoped to map the whole city, then California and the world! Many people have sent us their maps, and we're hoping that more people will map their neighborhoods for us to post on the site.
We also realized that mapping wasn't enough. Marx said the point of philosophy is to change the world, not just describe it - so we decided to propose public fruit parks and get homeowners and the city to plant fruit trees for everyone to enjoy.

What was your role in the Civic Matterscultural exchange project hosted by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhbitions (LACE) in January?
The show at LACE was great for us because we got to work in a 'pure' art context with amazing artists and artist collectives. Fallen Fruit really got the attention of the eco-world and people into Los Angeles and eccentricity. With them we try to explain that while this is about urban activism it is also an art piece. With the art world, we try to remind them that we may be artists, but our focus is on creating interventions in the world & provoking dialogue. Civic Matters was a lot of dialogue and collaboration. We did three new collaborative projects there.

What do you hope to show your visitors from Scandinavia about Los Angeles?
That LA far exceeds the Hollywood cliches about itself. Also, all of the Angelenos secret desire was to show them what a cool art scene is happening here right now.

What's the largest yield of fruit that you've managed to obtain from a single tree?
We don't think in quantity. We only sample, so there's more for everyone.

What do you think of the Not a Cornfield project? Do you think it complements your project or speaks to your mission statement?
I was inclined not to like it when I first read about it, especially given the huge budget & problems with the community. But when I saw it I was completely charmed, and after attending some of the events, I thought it was a real community art project and that Lauren Bon worked very hard to address the questions & adapt the project. I feel it has a strong affinity with Fallen Fruit, though we work on a micro scale, not the macro. That said, I'd love a 20 acre public fruit park!

What fruit is ready to be harvested now?
Avocados are here & loquats are coming - they are the coolest things growing in quantity in LA.

Please share a recipe that you use for one of your fruit hauls?
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. The great majority of lemons growing here are Meyer lemons, which are fruitier and less sour than Lisbon or Eureka lemons, the ones at supermarkets. You can make Meyer Lemonade stronger than regular lemonade, or you can use less sugar. It also does really well with some maple syrup, if you want to take the plunge.

What's your preferred mode of transportation?
Hallucinogens are useful.

How often do you ride the MTA subway or light rail?
Hardly at all. It stops not far from my house, but it don't go no place I usually go.

What's your favorite movie(s) or TV show(s) that are based in LA?
Norman Klein's DVD-ROM, "Bleeding Through -- Layers of Los Angeles," which is a sophisticated & layered investigation of the history & transformation of LA. Also Thom Andersen's "Los Angeles Plays Itself," which is a documentary on how LA has been used & constructed in the movies.

Best LA-themed book(s)?
Norman Klein's "History of Forgetting" and Mike David's "City of Quartz." John McPhee's "Control of Nature" has a section that looks at LA's geology & our (fairly futile) efforts to alter it; "Assembling California" is great too.

Share your best celebrity sighting experience.
JFK jr. (when he was interning at a law firm here I think) at a Hollywood party with lots of drugs and sex. I saw everything, but the CIA erased most of it. Also I saw Zelda Rubinstein, who played Tangina in "Poltergeist," in my local Ralph's and then learned she lived really close to me: "Walk to the light, CarolAnn. Walk to the light."

In your opinion, what's the best alternate route to the 405?
The best alternate to the 405 is not to live or work on the West Side, which is being scandalously overdeveloped. We need to take control of this city from the developers & corrupt politicians.

What's the best place to walk in LA?
Griffith Park.

It's 9:30 pm on Thursday. Where are you coming from and where are you going?
Usually I'm working late at CalArts, with paperwork or meetings. Around that time I'm done & driving down the 5 to Silver Lake. Traffic is great. I'm happy to be going home & can't wait to see my dog.

If you could live in LA during any era, when would it be?
Anytime before the 1960's, when it was still a group of towns connected by orange groves.

What's your beach of choice?
My beach of choice is Kehana beach in Hawaii, but it's too far to drive. So when I do drive, I love all the little inaccessible beaches in Palos Verdes. Plus they face Hawaii.

What is the "center" of LA to you?
The heart of LA has kept moving eastwards for me. Now it is around downtown, either Boyle Heights, Pico Union or Echo Park. They represent big chunks of the city's history and also its future: watch them get gentrified.

If you were forced to live in a neighboring county, which would you choose? Ventura County is a wussy answer.
Kern County, up in them windy hills.

If you could live in any neighborhood or specific house in LA, where/which would you choose?
I'd be happy to move into the Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Park. I'd even let people come every week to tour it. If I like you, you can stay the night.

Los Angeles is often stereotyped as a hard place to find personal connections and make friends. Do you agree with that assessment? Do find it challenging to make new friends here?
Yes. It doesn't open itself up to you. It's not as interactive and constantly on display as New York, where I'm from. You need to work harder here to connect to the city and it takes longer. Collaborative art projects help that along nicely.

What is the city's greatest secret?
If I told you I'd have to kill you.

Drinking, driving. They mix poorly, and yet they're inexorably linked. How do you handle this conflict?
The nice thing about all this heavy psychiatric medication is that you can't drink. I think far more people should be medicated.

Describe your best LA dining experience.
Ming Ma's plums from his yard in Silver Lake. I can't think of Ming now without thinking of his plums.

What do you have to say to East Coast supremacists?
yawn.

Do you find the threat of earthquakes preferable to the threat of hurricanes and long winters?
I've been through some big ones, and they are very unsettling. It gives you perspective on things though, and helps you decide what really matters. Winters just wear you down and numb your senses, at least in the city. Hurricanes might be cool.

Where do you want to be when the Big One hits?
Well, in the Northridge quake, I was convinced that it was the big one and I was the only person left alive. What a curse that is! So I guess I'll stay in bed and partake of the fate that meets my city.