“Alas, the lovely garden, placed high above the coast / Is built on crumbling rock. Landslides / Drags parts of it into the dephts without warning” —Bertolt Brecht from “Garden in Progress”

Living in exile in Los Angeles in the 1940s, Bertolt Brecht maps his new physical surroundings as well as his emigrant experience through his poetry. Using Brecht’s garden poems as an entry point to the city, Garden in Progress is the culmination of a body of research developed during the MAK Center residency program that presents gardens as a lens for navigating Los Angeles. Defined by the boundaries regulating property ownership, gardens are deeply enmeshed in the extractive process of land subdivision on which modern urban planning practices rely. Yet, they also rebel against those established principles. As places in constant transformation that rely on caretaking and constant upkeep, gardens offer alternative ways of space-making. Across the various ethnic communities of Los Angeles, the garden has historically served—and continues to serve—as a social space, a place of labor, a means to counter discriminatory urban policies, to reclaim access to space and resources, emerging as an urban common of the city. By examining the space of the garden as a structuring element embedded in the entire social fabric and diffuse urban texture of Los Angeles, the project aims to outline an inclusive interpretation of LA’ urban landscape.

For the final exhibition at the MAK Center I turned my fieldwork encounters into large 1:1 scale hand drawings. By placing the drawings across the site of Schindler’s Mackey Apartments, the installation translates my journey across Los Angeles into a progression through the exhibition. With their environmental scale, the drawings also functioning as site-specific interventions. The drawings use a line-drawing technique typical of architectural plans, creating a ghostly effect at 1:1 scale. This invites visitors to engage closely, encouraging a physical experience of the sites rather than just a visual one. Beyond the exhibition, the project included collaborations with LA-based artists and poets at David Horvitz's 7th Ave Garden and the Southern California Gardeners' Federation. It also concluded with a final drawing survey, created during a residency at the Charles Moore Foundation in Santa Monica.