The work is about the type of place I noticed a few years ago when I first arrived in New York. It is a small labor exchange market for illegal immigrants who, apparently, have no permission to work legally in the US. There are around 20 such points on the labor black-market map of New York City.
It usually looks like this: a person arrives around 8 in the morning and waits for 1- 4 hours until some potential employer will stop by and, even without leaving a car, will offer a one-day job on the construction site, cleaning, or loading something. Women are mostly offered house cleaning jobs. It is striking how insecure these people are in negotiating each proposal. I am also particularly impressed by their complete “passive” openness for the day ahead. Every day they come to this place, they have no idea how they will spend their “working day” or where this day will end. Standing or sitting, they wait every morning, swiping their phones, lazily having morning conversations, and looking at the horizon.
This work is about contemplation. The video may look like a chaotic set of street traffic. Still, in fact, it’s a documentation of all the points of the horizon that open up to a tired look every morning at a particular spot: the little 7/11 gas station triangle below the D train line, lined by New Utrecht Avenue, 15th Avenue, and 65th Street. All footage is due in the morning between 8:30 and 11:00 a.m.