Image by: Tim Morozzo
pal: Your AI Care companion
Commissioned, produced, co-created and performed by The Citizens Young Company in 2022/2023.
Do you feel overwhelmed? Burnt out? Anxious all the time? Then you need PAL!
A psychotherapeutic algorithm designed to complement the health care system, created to learn and grow with you, PAL is your companion, PAL is your future.
Invented in 2022, by young care worker Nikki, PAL started off as a simple app made to alleviate loneliness, social anxiety and depression, a care-bot if you like. Now, it’s 2044, the NHS has collapsed, and PAL is everywhere. Listening, watching and growing, as a dependency on automation quickly escalates.
Set in a dystopian world where natural resources are running out, observation has become monitoring and the government is choosing profit over people, perhaps a PAL isn’t what we need, but is there a way back?
sister radio
Co-produced by Stellar Quines and Pitlochry Festival Theatre in 2022. It was commissioned by Stellar Quines and Pearlfisher in 2020.
Sisters Fatemeh and Shirin have been living together, in the same flat in Edinburgh, for 43 years. In this flat they cook, read their coffee grains, listen to the radio, and try to remember their childhoods in Tehran but they no longer talk to one another. When a global pandemic hits and the sisters are locked in their flat, they are forced to reckon with their memories of a betrayal that changed the course of their relationship.
“a moving portrait of lives set down unexpected paths by both political events and personal choices”
Image by Fraser Band
Images by Mihaela Bodlovic
Niqabi ninja
An Independent Arts Projects production in association with Hewar Company for Independent Theatre and Performing Arts.
Co-commissioned by Shubbak Festival. Supported by British Council Arts Digital Collaboration Fund, Creative Scotland and Edinburgh International Festival.
Niqabi Ninja is a graphic-novel style revenge story about one woman’s transformation into a Cairene vigilante, as she attempts to right the wrongs of the male violence she sees all around her. Searing with dark comedy this is a fearless reflection on the lengths women are willing to go to keep themselves and others safe.
Originally written in reaction to the 2012-2014 mob sexual assaults in Tahrir Square, this is a story about rape culture and male violence, a violence that operates everywhere and isn’t limited to one part of the world.
It was performed in 2021 in London, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Inverness, Cairo and Alexandria.
“the emotional impact of Niqabi Ninja is devastating: it rages, it catalogues and it exposes, refusing to offer easy solutions.”