Right in the middle of February – like, the stone cold winter middle of February – something amazing appeared on a not-so-lonely stretch of Chapel Street.
Gold and mysterious and apparently, a portal.
To Tehran.
Over the course of ten days, dozens of New Havenites stepped through the door of a shipping container to meet a stranger on the other side of the world.
Samantha Jaff, a second year architecture student, had an early morning appointment last week. Inside the portal, she spoke to an Iranian artist/photographer living and working in Tehran.
“It felt like a real, human interaction. There were moments when I found myself thinking I could almost walk through the screen. Like I could transcend the very little that still separated us.'”
She stopped into Atticus after her appointment to write in the gold guestbook. With a gold pen. Naturally.
Too cold to wait outside. But worth the wait.
Missed the portal? Shared Studios, the organization behind the project, is running a Kickstarter campaign to get portals installed permanently in cities around the world – including New Haven. Find out more about them here.