TOTAL LANDSCAPING is an interdisciplinary reading group conceived by LA-based arts organizations Active Cultures and Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, publisher of X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal. The bi-monthly discussions will be held in sites that manifest the contentious spatial politics that define Los Angeles. The reading group will gather in orange groves and secret botanical gardens, in parks with views of fracking sites, and in our city’s many green housing experiments.

Each session begins with a curated text that examines the site itself and invites the group to branch into intimate, investigative research. Cultural workers, scholars, and artists across disciplines are invited to think about the way each site functions as a garden, and the explicit and tacit dynamics which reinforce colonial ideologies of spatial order. Participants will be interested in novel space-making within systems which legitimize and manage occupation, limited notions of property and ownership, and the conditions of precarity they perpetuate. The reading group will center alternative modes of belonging to our surroundings and to our collectives. Through a methodology of roaming, site-specific research, the reading group aims to nurture new grounds for an operative study of dissension, an exercise in landscaping without end.