Introduction

“Litter from urban trees is a widespread problem, varying in magnitude among trees of many species… People unintentionally walk on it at the risk of slipping and of staining carpets when tracking the crushed pulp indoors… An intolerable nuisance, annually littered the concrete walkway that connected the front and rear yards. Fleshy fruit usually is messy.” [2]

The research article cited above was written by a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service horticulturist and published in the December 1986 Journal of Arboriculture. Around the same time, millions of clonal males/wind-pollinated trees were planted in accordance with the USDA’s advice, “when used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.” [3]

This soon became the norm for urban cities across the world, including London, Melbourne, Montreal, and Tokyo. In recent years however, this urban policy has received backlash. The issue is that while these trees and plants are “litter-free,” they all produce abundant allergenic pollen. While the recent urban design and media focus has been on mitigating the production of allergenic pollen and the consequential epidemic of allergy and asthma, I question the widespread urban practices/politics that normalize the refusal of fruit bearing trees in the first place. The refusal of fleshy pulp, decomposition, and FRUIT sovereignty. 

I agree with the assertion that no form of life is inherently less than, dirty, or marginalized. Rather, these are social categories that we assign to specific types of social relations. Things, people, and practices that are assigned these values contain a strong provocation, calling us to confront established forms of social order. [4] So what happens when we move beyond perceiving fallen fruit as “intolerable nuisances”? When we instead allow ourselves to think of fruit “litter” as teachers? I look to my own personal context of living amongst wild guava trees (abundantly fruiting, ripening, falling, and then rotting) to help navigate this question. I focus specifically on the decomposing guava. 

Using MIT Media Lab professor Neri Oxman’s Knotty Objects summit as reference, I arrive at the decomposing guava as a designer, ecologist, and artist all at once. [5] I use these three lenses (completely entangled yet with distinct, designated missions) as an opportunity to creatively orient myself towards an underappreciated (for some, ugly, and useless) phenomena within the physical world. I hope that through this process, the decomposing guava challenges us to “not only question the way we live, but also to change material practice, to question manufacturing protocols and to completely redefine social constructs.” [6]

As a designer, I turn towards the decomposing guava as a representation of subculture. A counter aesthetic.
As a scientist, I grapple with the decomposing guava as an exploration of ecological interdependence. A site of interspecies collaboration.
As a socially engaged artist, I engage with the decomposing guava as an expression of vital kinship. As vibrant matter. 

This reframing or retelling of the decomposing guava’s (aka fruit litter’s) story speaks to my interests in centering Indigenous wisdom, ecological sensitivity, and political refusals within a meaningful social practice. It speaks to my resonance with stories, as art and design scholar Natalie Loveless puts it, “wondrous in their capacity to reorganize our approaches to social-material words… [the telling and retelling] a political performance. A world-making, knowledge-making practice.” I engage with these alternative stories of fruit litter “not only as sites of knowledge but as ethical relations,” encouraging us to push beyond predominant modes of production, consumption and relating-within urban spaces. [7]

Total disclosure, I understand that the issues of hygiene, pests, and stench associated with mass-collected rotting fruit (especially in hot and humid environments) are real. I do not mean to undermine the maintenance required to ensure that decomposition can coexist and even collaborate with human life. My point here is only to offer multiple and other stories of fruit litter, ones that are as real and as present as the predominant. Conflicting, entangled, and simultaneously existing stories. Blurring the boundaries between nuisance, kin, human, teacher, and other. 

Counter Aesthetic

The initial signal is a soft thud on the ground. An announcement to the surrounding humans, “Come get me, I’m more than ready!!” More often than not, the signal goes unnoticed. The bruised guava is on its way to bearing teeth and flesh; surrendering itself to the soil’s ecosystem. Cracks from the fall and maggot-made orifices begin to widen, allowing the sweet, sickly stench of its ripened body to rise up with dawn’s dew and the midday heat. Eight guava trees surround the perimeter of our house. About seven guavas fall from each tree every day. At most, we salvage ten of those in a day. That still leaves us with a lot of decomposing guavas. Pheromones, stains, and all. 

The color of its skin ranges from pale yellow, to cream, to lime green—with splotches of brown. The inside pulp is mostly of two kinds: pink and white. It is squishy, seedy, and smelly. The decomposing guava attracts fruit flies, ants, and maggots. Sometimes little beetles. As it decomposes, it flattens against the floor. Or it hollows out as balls. Or it turns inside out. 

It beckons me to bend down. To move closer to the ground. Awakening an attentiveness to the sounds, smells, sensations, and sights of our messy garden floor. 

The decomposing guava becomes the focus of my daily photographic documentations. I am enamored. For most, the rotting guava is pretty grotesque. It stinks, attracts bugs, and apparently doesn’t look all that attractive. My housemates request me to throw any unused guavas farther away from the home once I’m done foraging for jam or other guava-related experiments. They request the housemaid who comes once a fortnight to clear out the guavas. 

Turning to and finding joy in the decomposing guava leads me to question the conventions of urban order, domestic pleasure and belonging. I am reminded of queer theorist Sara Ahmed’s thoughts on how “the body gets directed in some ways more than others.” [8] Ahmed argues that the ways in which we collectively orient ourselves are far from neutral. The collective direction away from fruit litter is an organized one, and speaks to a larger heteronormative social aspiration that our living spaces be sterilized, homogenized, and kept under control. 

I think of all who are/that is pushed to the margins in contemporary society today. Queer, Indigenous, Houseless, Disabled, and Immigrant Bodies (to name a few) are actively hidden from view. These orientations are “not simply given. They are the effects of the repetitions of actions over time.” [9] They are the effects of urban design policies that enforce a sense of safety (for white collar workers and tourists) through total management, surveillance, and homogenization of space. A vision that neither fosters civility nor community. [10]

In orienting myself towards the decomposing guava, I make the strange not only familiar but also a crucial part of my feeling at home. I also embrace a garden aesthetic that is counter to the perfectly mowed, repaired, weed-less, and cultivated standard; a sweeping exercise in conformity, an indicator of socio-economic character—the lawn. [11] If the lawn represents an exercise in wealth and wastefulness, making space for the decomposing guava represents an exercise in humility and resourcefulness. The decomposing guava is self-sufficient and provides nourishment back to the soil from which it grows. The guava trees (endemic to the subtropical region of San Rafael, Colombia, where I am currently based), thrive without any maintenance and share an abundance of medicine—in the form of leaves and fruit throughout the year. 

Lawns on the other hand—large, uniform patches of non-native singular-type green grass that should be no more than an inch and a half tall, neatly edged—require a number of resources and daily care. The grass cannot be eaten or used for any purpose other than it being in a lawn. Yet, it is the most grown (mono)crop in the United States and countries like Colombia are following suit. Purely for aesthetic purposes. 

The decomposing guava, a counter aesthetic towards which we might orient ourselves, provides an invitation to refuse policies that encourage wastefulness, exclusion, and homogenization. I orient myself towards the guava via writing, peering closely through the various lenses introduced in this essay. I also orient myself towards the guava via cooking, as well as more formally, through the lens of my camera. 

The Decomposing Guava (2021) (Fig. 1) is one such result. It is a collection of 108 digital photographs of the decomposing guavas that surround my home in San Rafael, Colombia. Organized in grid form, the arrangement reflects the even attentiveness given to each frame and the investigative nature with which I arrive at the guavas. The aesthetic as presented in the photographs runs parallel to the ecological design work of Subnaturalists and their focus on unconventional forms of natural beauty. In representing curious worlds that are canonically marginalized in arts and architecture discourse, they reveal tensions arising within our current contaminated conditions. [12]

In investigating, monitoring, and documenting the strangeness of the real, I raise the question: how might we acquire more thoughtful ways of inhabiting and sharing space? I orient myself towards this counter aesthetic everyday so that different more just worlds may come into view. Worlds that welcome the unfamiliar and reject the oppressive norms of a capital driven culture.