One Tonne Fruit Bowl

Taking the UN environment programme’s conservative estimate that globally 1.3 billion tonnes of food produced for human consumption is wasted annually, combined with the ludicrously conservative estimate that one tonne of food takes one labour hour to produce, then that’s already 3.5 million hours, four hundred years, or five entire lifetimes of eighty years thrown away per day. The reality is incalculably worse. Here our ‘wasting’ as creatures inevitably progressing towards death intersects with our wastefulness regarding food, environment, and time.

One Tonne Fruit Bowl was a performance produced as artist in residence at MKA: Theatre of New Writing, culminating in a three night run at Hot! Hot! Hot! Climate Arts Festival. For this show Huge Sillytoe collected masses of discarded fruits and vegetables from markets around Melbourne, then distributing bowls of this produce to the audience and inviting them to pelt the artist dressed as a spoon with peppers, oranges, and other organic missiles at the sound of a horn. The first fruit or vegetable to hit Huge in the spoon/face dictated the first of a series of short plays to be presented. Once the play was over, Huge returned to sit in their fruit bowl, the horn sounded once more, and the process repeated until another fruit or vegetable splattered on Huge’s spoon/face, dictating the commencement of another play. Plays included giving birth to a soldier, telepathically communicating with a stuffed dog on the other side of the planet, and Huge attaching cabbage leaves to their buttocks and being chased around the entire venue upon the announcement that the first audience member to successfully remove a leaf would win a prize (a cabbage). What a waste of time, no?