Resistant Forms: Opacity, Error and Redaction in the Feminist Concrete

This paper considers how language operates not simply as a vehicle for meaning, but as a material and contested site of artistic practice. Bringing together the work of Nancy Holt, Carolee Schneemann, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, the presentation traces how text is variously buried, fragmented, obscured, and reassembled — how it moves between page, body, and landscape — and how these movements produce both connection and dissonance.

Across these practices, writing exceeds its conventional role as representation and instead becomes a spatial, performative, and embodied process. Whether through Holt’s circular dialectics of perception, Schneemann’s dense and excessive collages, or Rasheed’s iterative, fugitive text systems, language is continually put under pressure — stretched to the point where it begins to fracture.

What emerges through these fractures are shared strategies of opacity, error, and redaction. These are not simply aesthetic gestures, but methodological ones, shaping how artists engage with questions of visibility, authorship, and knowledge production. Read through the lens of archival theory, such practices expose the archive not as a neutral repository, but as a structure governed by inclusion and exclusion — one that these artists both inhabit and resist.