In response to COP26, the Climate Portals Festival uses Shared Studios’ ‘portal’, a renovated gold shipping container with audio-visual technology that creates the effect of being in the same room, connecting to other portals around the globe (https://www.sharedstudios.com/). Sally Charlton & Althea Young were commissioned to make a performance to be experienced by audiences in the portal.

The Climate Portals Festival is supported by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, British Council, Harrison Parrott, Scottish Ballet & Shared Studios.

Manifesting as an audio-textual presentation, Sally Charlton and Althea Young’s ‘Intimate Infinities; you as here and everywhere’ sits two people, one in Glasgow (Scotland) and one in Erbil (Iraq), virtually face to face. A guided meditation on the gravity of an individual life, this performance transcends the theoretical in an attempt to establish a tangible, authentic and visceral empathy between two people. ‘Intimate Infinities; you as here and everywhere’ asks if and how radical empathy for an individual life might extend into our care for wider ecologies and highlight the relationship between personal, political and ecological grief.