New phone booths in Times Square explore the complex immigrant experience
With his new installation Once Upon A Place, Afghan-American artist Aman Mojadidi has rewired retired city phone booths to play oral histories from New York immigrants.
It’s not every day a new phone booth crops up in New York. In fact, there are allegedly only 4 phone booths left in the entire city. But this summer in Times Square, amidst the silver Statue of Liberties, tourists from Tennessee and confetti-colored lights, you’ll find a constellation of three phone booths, all recently installed by artist Aman Mojadidi. Italian teenagers use them as a backdrop for selfies (“Who knew phone booths were even still a thing?”) and a jaded off-duty Minnie Mouse takes her smoke break against one. But inside them, you can’t actually make any phone calls. What you can do, Mojadidi explains, is listen.
“You step into the phone booth, you pick up the phone, and you listen to people from a wide range of countries talking about why they left home, what their experience was before they left, and why they came to New York in particular,” Mojadidi, a TED Fellow, says. Three years in the making, the new public art installation Once Upon A Place presents more than 70 New York immigrant stories on three decommissioned New York City phone booths that Mojadidi remodeled and repurposed with custom audio players. He installed the booths in June with the support of Times Square Arts.
“As a storytelling conduit, the phone booth is something uniquely New York,” Mojadidi says. “It just seemed to make sense to try and bring those conduits back, and fill them with a new kind of story.”
Mojadidi first conceived of the installation back in 2014 as a response to rising anti-immigrant attitudes around the United States and the world.
“I wanted to do a project about migration, but dealing with it within an urban context, because so much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric was about how immigrants are destroying the fabric of cities, or destroying the fabric of societies,” he says. “But cities like New York, metropolitan cities around the world, have all actually been built or exist as they are today because of the immigrants that came there, settled there, lived there, worked there.”
Why then, Mojadidi wants to know, are we always trying to kick them out?
Mojadidi himself was born to immigrant parents. They moved in the late 1960s from Kabul, Afghanistan, to Jacksonville, Florida, where he grew up in a segregated neighborhood called Confederate Point. “My family history has influenced a lot of the work that I’ve done, and a lot of the reason why I’ve focused on themes of cultural duality and migration,” he says. Now somewhat nomadic, Mojadidi moved back to Afghanistan in 2003, and then to Paris in 2012. He’s been living in Brooklyn for the last few months while working on Once Upon A Place.
For the new project, Mojadidi conducted months of research about the history of New York’s many ethnic enclaves — Russians in Brighton Beach, Liberians in Staten Island, Mexicans in Sunset Park. Then last summer, during the height of the 2016 US election, he spent three months commuting around the city, visiting cafés and diners, mosques and temples, community centers and storefronts, collecting New York immigration stories.
“A lot of it, in the beginning, was just going to the neighborhoods and spending time talking with people and actually trying to build up some relationships within,” he says. “There were no questions. I basically let people speak from the beginning until they were done, and tell me about anything they wanted to talk about.”
Once Upon A Place presents these oral histories mostly unedited. “I wanted it to be very ethnographic and very reflexive,” he says. “So I didn’t necessarily edit myself out when there were times where I either responded or can be heard somehow interacting with the storyteller.”
Mojadidi also allowed participants to speak in their mother tongue if they wanted to, so you’ll hear everything from Spanish to French to Tibetan. “When you hear a woman speaking in Ga,” a language spoken in Ghana, “and the emotion in her voice, even if you don’t understand exactly what she’s saying, there’s something visceral you feel very physically when you listen,” he says.
Like all immigration journeys, the 70 featured in Once Upon A Place are deeply personal; there is no one archetypal immigrant experience. In one oral history, a Russian woman talks about coming to New York to make a better life for herself and her family. By her own approximation, she succeeded spectacularly. “We have everything,” she says. “I love America and I still love Russia, too.” Others have a more complex relationship with the country, like a Turkish man who struggles with the ways American capitalism has kept his family apart. “You hear not only that people came here because of this golden vision of America,” Mojadidi says, “but people came out of necessity and are actually struggling with that decision still.”
The project, which is on display until September 5, takes on new resonance under Trump, who ran for president and won on a platform of fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy promises — from a Mexican border wall to a broad ban on Muslim immigrants. In this context, the project feels like a trenchant defense of the vital role of immigrants in contemporary American life. In fact, at the installation’s premiere, Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, said that the organization has “never done a project that is more important, more timely, and more powerful.”
“Why is it such a problem that people cross borders?” Mojadidi asks. “Why is it that all of a sudden we still want to try to enforce these arbitrarily defined borders on people in a time when these borders don’t actually even represent the true experience and the true reality of people around the world?”
And of course, the project’s site-specific location in the heart of Times Square — “the Crossroads of the World” — only underlines and amplifies these questions.
“Times Square is a big tourist destination for Americans, and many Americans who come from the Midwest or other parts of the country, who might come from red states, who might be people who are Republicans, who voted for Trump. If these folks go into the phone booths and listen to these stories, perhaps they would also have a different idea of what New York is,” Mojadidi says. “So that’s maybe the dream — that the project might help people rethink their own attitudes towards immigration.”
The phone booths will be gone by the fall, and Mojadidi doesn’t yet know where they will end up next. But every day, you can find the stories of immigrants from Sierra Leone and Spain and Sri Lanka all around New York City — on every subway, neighborhood bodega and corner of Times Square — if you’re only willing to listen.
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
