Both Sides and The Center featured literary readings and performances enacting various levels of proximity, intimacy, and distance. Both Sides started with a reading and reception at the Schindler House on August 19th. The following evening, the participating writers performed work that considered R.M. Schindler’s architecture and the unique ways in which the Schindler House commingles inside and outside spaces. Structured as an open house, events took place throughout the building and grounds, some simultaneously, some staggered, with writers taking up temporary residence in certain rooms. Performances engaged ideas such as: the physicality of space, house as stage, voyeurism, private as public, the strangeness in the familiar and the brutal nature of domesticity.

Both Sides and The Center took its name from a line in Gertrude Stein’s “Rooms,” Tender Buttons. The event was curated by Amina Cain and Teresa Carmody. Participants included: John Beer, Robin Coste-Lewis, Michael du Plessis, Bhanu Kapil, Myriam Moscona & Jen Hofer, Vanessa Place & Kim Rosenfield, Amarnath Ravva, Sophie Robinson, and Anna Joy Springer.