This past July would have been Philando Castile’s 37th birthday. He should be celebrating with his wife and daughter, but instead the entire country watched him die slowly at the hands of law enforcement just ten days before his 33rd birthday in 2016. Castile’s widely-reported death had been part of a painful pattern of abuse that countless black and brown people have faced at the hands of police in the United States and the pain felt by those losses remains. How do you honor a life properly if they met and end like Castile? How can you share the warmth of his smile with the world, if the last image we have is watching him lay lifeless in the drivers seat of his car while his child wept in the backseat.
“1-800 Happy Birthday” is a voicemail project created in 2020 by Mohammad Gorjestani, an Iranian-American director who has been making indie movies since 2007. The ongoing project, which started online, was recently transformed into a large-scale exhibit that now sits in a 10,000 square-foot space called WorthlessStudios, at 7 Knickerbocker Avenue.
Gorjestani’s piece is made of twelve upcycled New York City pay phone booths, each standing 7ft tall and weighing over 500 pounds, arranged on a few patches of turf. The repurposed phone booths, which will on display there through January 16th, are meant to honor the lives of 12 people Gorjestani identifies as victims of police brutality: Philando Castile, Dujuan Armstrong, Sandra Bland, Stephon Clark, Fred Cox, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Xzavier Hill, Donovon Lynch, Sean Monterrosa, Tony Robinson, and Mario Woods.
