A new exhibition opening this at Cambridge's arts and community space The Shop recounts an artists intriguing experiment to engage people with politics - using fruit.

On a visit to Venezuela, artist Alan Warburton found himself discussing local politics with a friend. The friend picked up a melon they were sharing and started to slice it up, dividing seeds to demonstrate the various interest groups that were at work. For the artist it was a moment of simple inspiration – talking about real issues using fruit. He embarked on a project called Cortando El Melon, or Cutting The Melon, talking to groups of Venezuelans, photographing and videoing them as they explained and debated their world sculpting and cutting melons to make their points.

He brought the idea back home this autumn, taking Cambridge people to an orchard where they chose apples, then discussed local politics with them. This December he’s exhibiting the results of Fruits of Conversation at the Cambridge art space The Shop, XVIII Jesus Lane. The exhibition of photographs, videos and pieces of writing runs until 20 December. He discusses his project with RSA Arts and Ecology here:

How did Fruits of Conversation start?

Cutting The Melon had gone really well, so I wanted to see how it would go down in the UK. Obviously we’re a lot less vocal about politics here, so I needed to take a different route… part of that was letting the volunteers in Cambridge go and pick the fruit themselves, so they got the chance to get their hands a bit dirty and to break the ice with the other people.

So you started this in the orchard?

Yes. That became a really important stage in the project. We had a food historian come along, and the head gardener gave us a tour and told us the history. This orchard dated back to the 1800s and had a huge variety of forgotten and unidentified varieties. So from there the project obviously started a discussion about sustainability and biodiversity which changed the focus. In Venezuela it’s such a politically engaged populace. Here it was about getting in touch with politics.

Presumably in Venezuela fruit growing is automatically bound up with issues of land rights.

Completely. One of the aims of the recent land reform in Venezuela was to increase productivity and reduce the need to import fruits.   Here there are very few orchards that make money. Even the ones that do are maintained by people who have a huge enthusiasm for apples. They're not run for profit. There are scores of orchards out there whose crop rots on the ground every year. Yet we still import apples.

And fruit contains this idea of eternal cycles…

I think there’s a contrast between what the participants discuss and the fruit. There’s a deliberate tension between the eternal cycle of fruit and these passing socially contingent topics. Using apples is very much a leveller. It slows down discussions and makes people a lot more thoughtful and less combative, so when they need to make a point it facilitates a kind of levelled discussion. The first cut is always the hardest. They don’t want to cut the apple because they have to make an assertion. But once they’ve done that they throw caution to the wind.

Fruits of Conversation/Cutting The Apples exhibition runs from 8 December until 20 December at The Shop. Details here.