At A Distance #4
Apple After Apple After Apple
by Anna Andrea Winther
Performance, photography, text. 2019-2020. Slanic-Moldova, Romania.
When in the mountain village of Slanic-Moldova I came across an apple tree. I watched as people ate apples off the tree yet stepped on the fallen ones, which they regarded as trash. This shift from food to trash fascinated me. As an Icelander I am not accustomed to seeing fruit trees within cityscapes and my only hope of getting fruit is from the fake landscapes of supermarkets. These wax-coated and sticker-labelled fruits were one of the main sources of my diet, yet I rarely think of where it comes from. This direct contact people had to the tree, eating straight off it, made me think about the pointlessness of industrial processes of fruits. They are aggressively picked by machines and collected by the tons, rinsed with chemicals, coated with edible wax and by the end labelled with a sticker informing the consumer of the company they came in contact with.
This performance is based on these factory processes that these fruits typically go through. The apples on the hill that are regarded as trash are picked, processes and then put back where they came from. Commenting on food waste, pointless human inverventions of capitalism and bringing these hidden processes into the open.
“Ugly” fruit and vegetables are a major cause of global food waste. About 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year and, of this, fruit and vegetables have the highest wastage rates of any food type. Beyond other reasons such as overproduction, improper storage and disease, researchers have attributed losses on aesthetic grounds to strict government regulations, supermarkets’ high standards, as well as customer expectations of how produce should look. As climate change and its influence on our lives intensify, reducing waste from precious food harvests becomes vital. Anna Andrea Winther is interested in deconstructing food manufacturing processes against the produce’s natural habitats, forms and history. Her performance examines the failings of the food industry, aiming to raise greater awareness towards producing and consuming fruit and vegetables sustainably. Four performers, including the artist, dressed in black, act as the conveyor belt of an apple sorting machine, performing the steps of the farm-to-shelf supply chain: fruit picking, cleaning, wax coating, and grading. After one apple at a time has been processed, they are each rolled down the assembly line again, ending in the same place they started. The fruitlessness of the process becomes a potent metaphor of waste.
– Simona Nastac