What stories define New York City, not as a Hollywood fantasy but as a fabric of neighborhoods, workday routines, and everyday instances of creativity? In late March, Open Call artists Aisha Amin and Cindy Tran joined each other online to share their experiences listening to and telling the stories of New Yorkers around the city.

This summer, Amin’s installation, built around her documentary film of Masjid At-Taqwa, a mosque in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, will appear in the Open Call exhibition, bringing an intimate and communal space of prayer into The Shed’s galleries. Tran’s film, showcasing a sonnet sequence written about small business owners from across the city’s five boroughs, will be on view at The Shed in June, and Tran will screen her film there on June 5. They began their conversation by thinking back to the questions they had about themselves and about New York City that led them to the subjects of their films.

Cindy Tran:
With the changes to our lives from the pandemic, we’ve almost all been asking ourselves who we are: Am I a friend? Am I a mother? Am I a worker, my job, my hobbies? And we’re not any one of those identities; that would simply be an illusion. And, similarly, I think, people imagine that only a handful of places represent New York, often through what we see in movies and television. We know there’s so much more to New York than that. People who come from the far corners of the city to work in Manhattan every day. They give something to the city. They risk something, even during the pandemic, and then they go back home. I wanted to go into the neighborhoods that people might not often think of.

I also wanted to break as many stereotypes as possible. So, being Chinese American—which I don’t quite feel fits for me, but let’s say Chinese American—what do people think of when they think of Chinese people in New York? Maybe knockoffs and Chinatown restaurants? The first requirement I set for myself was to identify neighborhoods and what [stereotypes] they’re known for, if anything, and then I eliminated that kind of establishment from the list of possibilities.

My second requirement was that the business owners speak a language other than English, because I wanted to incorporate other languages into each of the poems. In Queens, the person I ended up interviewing is a Thai woman who owns a tattoo parlor. She wanted to bring an artistic community to a really quiet neighborhood. In my work, I wanted to recognize that these places are not quite what you might think they are, and the people who live there might not quite be who you think they are either. These are all beautiful people with unique stories.

Aisha Amin:
Cindy, that is exactly how I feel about certain places in the city. You can go to the same bodega every day for 20 years and still not really understand the owner, unless you have a conversation with him. I was a child in New York City and grew up and learned how to navigate the city really quickly. You’re in a constant mode of discovery when you’re walking down the street, and it’s so special.

For my project, I was interested in pockets of communities and storefront religious spaces, particularly storefront mosques. At the time that I came up with the idea for the film, I was living in Manhattan, walking in the East Village one Friday afternoon. I saw maybe 80 people lined up on a block that had been blocked off to traffic. They were doing their Friday prayer and had spilled out from what looked like a former storefront that had been turned into a mosque. In the span of just one block, I could see people lined up praying together, some of them using cardboard as makeshift prayer mats. That’s the thing about New York: you think you know it, and then you cross the street to find a different world.

I chose Masjid At-Taqwa in Bed-Stuy because it is one of the bigger mosques in Brooklyn, and I wanted to film inside of a large space. It was purely for a technical reason at first, but then I started speaking to a man named Ali who is the head of security and learning about the mosque by watching archival videos. I realized its story goes deep. The mosque was bought at auction for a very low price by a small group of Muslims in the ‘80s. Its block was very dangerous at the time. The founders of the mosque had the idea to clean up the neighborhood, so people would want to go to the mosque more frequently. They created schools and used to pick up trash on the streets. When the neighborhood started looking nicer and more attractive to developers, they started getting offers to buy the building for three, four times the price that they had bought it at the auction. That made me understand how real estate in New York works: buying property, investing in it, only to sell it. But that’s not what they’ve done here. In the film, the head of security says the mosque is a bedrock of Brooklyn.

The Shed:
What are you both working on right now, and what’s left to do for your commissions?

Amin:
For Open Call, I thought I had a lot of time to suss out the design of the installation in which the film will be projected, but it’s all moving quickly. Right now I am working on wrapping up the visual edit of the film, which will be split onto four screens. At the same time, I have been ordering fabric samples to decide what fabric works best for the projection of the visuals.

Tran:
You just caught me off guard when you mentioned fabric because I didn’t even realize this would be part of your piece.

Amin:
When I applied to Open Call, I had a grand idea of how the installation structure would look and how the film would be projected. It turns out it’s almost like we’re building a sculpture and then filling it with fabric. It’s such an interesting process, a very physical process of figuring out how to actually build it.

Tran:
That sounds beautiful, Aisha. For my work, I’m just finishing up interviews with business owners. I’m writing a crown of sonnets: 15 poems, but 14 separate, unique ones, and the fifteenth is a composite of lines from each of the others. So, I wanted to find 14 business owners to talk to. I discovered that I couldn’t just meet a business owner and then write a poem, meet another business owner and write another poem. Because of the locked-in, intertwined structure of the sonnets, I had to wait until I had a number of poems written to determine how to order them and create an emotional arc for the series. Now that I have 10 or 11 to work with, I’m starting to arrange them by thinking about the story each tells about its business owner.

The Shed:
When did you first realize your commission was a project you could realize?

Tran:
At the beginning of the pandemic, several things were going on at the same time, though not much was happening. We were all living in our anxiety, sitting in our bedrooms or at our kitchen tables. I had my routine of making coffee and working and looking out the window. I noticed a clothing store where the owner would set up a metal folding chair in the display area every single morning, and just sit there with his arms crossed and look out his window, too. I don’t think anyone went in to buy anything or even picked anything up, but that was his set-up every single day. I found it striking that this routine must mean something to him.

And, then, as I started to return to grocery shopping during the lockdown, I had a weird experience of seeing business owners and employees, and feeling lucky to have that social contact, but also feeling resentful of it, not wanting it. We were all struggling in these extreme ways. I was remembering what it was like to go into a grocery store and stand in an aisle for a really long time, asking myself, which package of cookies do I want? Or, which of these three pints of ice cream do I want? I really missed that luxury. I missed going into a theater and sitting shoulder to shoulder next to a complete stranger. You can have this intimate experience and it is very magical.

I had already been writing poems, specifically sonnets for small businesses, and then posting them as comments on Yelp. I gave every single business five stars with my posts. Since I was already talking to strangers on a regular basis, or at least before the pandemic, and I love writing poems and posting them on Yelp for fun, all I needed was someone to help me make a film. That was the beginning for me.

Amin:
Cindy, I think what stands out to me most about what you just said is your description of taking your time in the grocery store, thinking about what you want and making it an outing and an experience. We no longer go to the grocery store thinking we’ll spend time there. Instead, it’s a mission, we’re in and out. And it’s a scary thing to do. I’ve been thinking a lot more about the fact that a grocery store worker wakes up at 6am to open the store and spends the entire day interacting with folks. Your work, Cindy, has also made me reflect on that.

My film documents a communal prayer that happens every Friday afternoon in a confined space. It takes place in a room that is small for the amount of people who come to pray. So, I’ve been thinking, too, about what it means to be in such close corners with people. For the audio, I had placed a recorder in the mosque to capture the two-hour prayer, and the amount of coughing and throat-clearing and sniffling and chatter I recorded… Now, it would be a terrifying experience to go there if you didn’t have a mask and weren’t vaccinated, but there’s also something so nice about the closeness of the people in that space.

Tran:
I’ve been thinking a lot about what kinds of sound to capture for the texture of my film. So, when I think of prayer, I imagine rugs being laid on the floor and then hands touching the rugs. Do you have sounds like that, as well?

Amin:
I was so certain in pre-production that I wanted sound to be the main element, almost more important than the visuals, because it can be such an experiential quality of a work like this. It brings something new to the film. I wanted to capture, exactly as you said, the sounds of people’s heads touching the mat, which is so subtle, but you do hear it because there are 400 people doing it at the same moment. There’s this very soft mat-hitting. And then the sounds of people’s knees cracking as they go to bend during prayer. With high-quality sound, and the fact that it is going to be an installation, you feel those moments as much as you hear them and see them.

Tran:
So, then, how has that consideration changed for you? You thought it was going to be one of the primary focuses, but now it’s not?

Amin:
Well, I’m now more focused on how to create a soundscape for the installation, something that complements what we’re seeing on the four screens and including it not only as observational, diegetic sound that I recorded. Instead, I want to weave it together, so it’s like a composed song. The song of the knees cracking and the people shuffling and taking off their shoes. I’m working with my sound mixer to create an eight-minute song of all of that, which is synced with the visuals.

Tran:
I can easily imagine poets writing ekphrastic poems based on that experience of the sound you describe.

Amin:
You should, and I’m happy to be your liaison into that world! I’m wondering, for your project, what are your plans for the audio?

Tran:
The most important consideration for me is to capture the voices of the business owners. I want people to hear the intimacy of their words. I’m going to spend some time coaching and directing them on how to read the poem. And I am working with a music composer who will then incorporate some sound. I’m going to need a number of the poems written for him to get a sense of how he’ll compose the music.

Amin:
That’s exciting. What you’re saying about coaching these people through these poems, it sounds like you are directing actors in a way. I know we both work in relation to documentary forms, but what even counts as documentary anymore? The line is so blurred. How are you going to direct these people to read the poems? How will you let their own personalities come through, as well? It’s a hard balance, I’m sure.

Tran:
I’ve spent quite a bit of time communicating with them either over the phone or in emails before meeting with them, usually for about two hours. And then in follow-up conversations I asked for translations of certain words or phrases, or asked if they had thought of any idioms that I could incorporate into the poems that would feel intimate to them. I also want to make sure that there’s quite a bit of silence, because there was so much violence in the last year while we were sitting alone and going outside and hearing so much silence.

The Shed:
How did you each develop the personal relationships to the people in your films, who come from communities that you may not belong to, especially with the changes the pandemic has forced in our day-to-day lives?

Amin:
I started work before the shutdown, but I think that if I decided to shoot this film during a pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to. I don’t think it would exist if I could not have been there, physically present with these people. With the mosque in particular, it was important that I showed my face.

There was something about being physically close to the other people during the Friday prayer that made them want to trust me and made me stand out as a filmmaker to them. Filming people is such an intimate experience. It’s so important to engage in long conversations with whomever you’re working with, to not treat them like a subject, but like a human being, like a friend, like someone who you want to get to know, and who you want to open up to you.

As much as possible, I wait to introduce the camera later on in the process. I think that’s always helpful because you can have conversations and they can open up to you. And then when you bring the camera in, you tell them it’s just going to be another one of those sessions and conversations, and nothing needs to change in the way that you’re speaking to each other, because you already know each other.

Tran:
But, Aisha, I can relate to what you describe of developing these relationships, because there’s been no camera present as I’m having conversations with these business owners. I’m just following them and seeing if they have any questions. We haven’t filmed anyone yet. As I’ve met these people, I’ve discovered a lot of them have a special place in their lives or in their hearts for art, so that they wanted to contribute to the project. A lot of them used to be artists in some way and then they left art behind so that they could do something else to make money. I love talking to people and asking questions. It’s required time and a bit of vulnerability, but I think I have a way of gauging how deep to go and when to stop.

The business owners are sharing their stories with me, and I am writing the sonnets based on those stories, and in the film they’ll be reading the poem. I’m seeing my film as less documentary in nature, although there are aspects of the documentary to it. I’m not doing any record keeping. I’ll only have one filming session with each owner. It feels more like an art film to me. It’s a combination of these different forms, and I have an idea of what it will look and sound like, but I don’t know what it’s called.

My attraction to the sonnet form, however, is an easier question. I mean, sonnets are love poems! I can’t think of any other way than [to write] a love poem to express joy layered with some sadness, to express your appreciation, to express what you notice. And it’s all condensed into 14 lines with rhymes, which I love because the body recognizes rhymes and they move into your memory. In a lot of the stories in my poems, the way we live and what we think about and how we feel turns out to center around themes of time and temporality. In interviewing these people and then writing the sonnets, so much of the work is about how we’re making sense of the past, how we are thinking about the future, and then whether we’re even present in the moment. So I love rhyme as a structure to make meaning and move across time.

Amin:
Cindy, by writing sonnets based on these personal stories it feels like you’re collaborating with these business owners, so that they are also the artists of this work. Because you’re in conversation with them, they’re part of the art-making process; you’re making a testament to human connection and conversation and friendship. I think that’s really special.

With work that borders on documentary forms and that includes “real people”—that’s such a weird term—but real human beings on the screens that other folks are seeing, I think it’s really important that those people also see themselves in the space of an installation or gallery. And when they do see themselves, it’s quite a radical experience, especially if they wouldn’t normally be in a place like that. And when you collaborate artistically with them, their moment seeing themselves in an art installation is pretty spectacular. I do come from a traditional documentary background and I’ve expanded one of my earlier films, Friday, into this installation, in fact.

Having the film as a purely observational piece wasn’t enough. I wasn’t explaining what was happening well enough, I wasn’t giving the viewer enough of what they needed to understand. For this film, I had always hoped for an installation or a sculptural space open and inviting to viewers to come inside. A visitor to The Shed’s gallery space, even one who has never been inside of a mosque, can enter my installation, see the film on these four screens with its striking observational footage, and feel like they’re in a mosque on a Friday with all of these people. You’ll see people next to you, you’ll feel your body in the space and see the bodies on the screen. Opening the doors of this spiritual and religious space to the public was always my goal, so that it becomes less stigmatized or misunderstood.

Tran:
It sounds very alive in the way you describe it.

Amin:
Alive is a good way of putting it. There’s lots of life and activity there.

Tran:
I’m ready to visit your installation with all of my friends. And then we’ll all write poems afterwards, in a group.

Amin:
I love that. Can I be part of the poetry workshop? I’m not very good, but I can try!