The second Q.E.D. II emphasized R. M. Schindler’s definition of “space architecture” as a way of thinking through questions of gender. Curator Kim Rosenfield associated the “radical flow” of the Schindler House with the way her work, and that of the panelists’, engages with these questions. Rosenfield chose Yedda Morrison and Vanessa Place as her fellow panelists, and Andrea Quaid moderated.
Emancipation via elimination
Vanessa Place's 'Boycott Project'
For all their twists and spin, poets like Kamau Brathwaite and Charles Bernstein seem strikingly direct in their politics when compared to Vanessa Place and her poetics of iteration. Where in a work like World on Fire Bernstein clearly attacks the US invasion of Iraq, Place, like some other conceptual writers, seems to reject the idea that we might change the world by transforming our language. Indeed, at times Place takes direct aim at texts that seek a revolutionary change in the social order.
For instance, in her “Boycott Project,” Place reproduces feminist classics such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex with all female-gendered words replaced by their male counterparts. (See Place’s The Father & Childhood.)