POSTNATURAL APPLE – 2023

 

Master Experimental Design

Master-Thesis

Mentors: Johannes Bruder, chmara.rosinke

photos: Chiara Marinai + Leonie Hochstrasser

 

 

The apple – the most eaten fruit in Switzerland; symbol of love, fertility, knowledge, wealth; archetype of the fruit – has been modified, refined and multiplied by humans for thousands of years. Nowadays, apple production is an industrialized process, treating the apple as a product or even a brand. In the selection of cultivated varieties, the focus is more on shelf life and economy than on variety and taste, and a complex web of demand and requirements from a wide range of stakeholders spans the entire production process.

By positioning the apple as a post-natural object – something that has been intentionally altered by humans through domestication, selective breeding, or genetic engineering – Leonie Hochstrasser’s master‘s thesis offers an alternative perspective on a supposedly natural product. With food as an interdisciplinary tool that touches and affects, Postnaturalism is made tangible using the example of the apple. In the installation with Food Experience „PostNatural Apple“ at CIVIC, visitors were invited to look under the skin of the apple and perceive with all their senses the various tools and processes that shape the apple today. Everyday things, like a „local“ fruit, can reveal connections in society if we look more closely. The apple remains an apple, but does it taste different after absorbing such information?