Police, Fences, and Containers: A Photographic Report from Calais’ “Jungle”
►http://thefunambulist.net/2016/02/04/police-fences-and-containers-a-photographic-report-from-calais-jungl
“TWO IMPORTANT POINTS:
1. Although the photographs presented here are meant to contribute to a larger imaginary about the Calais’s “Jungle,” they represent only a fragment of it and, as such, can be misleading, the reason being that I did not want to take pictures of people. Is missing, among other things, the Jungle’s ‘main streets’ with its Afghani and Kurdish restaurants, its small shops and its religious buildings (three of which were demolished two days ago). The audacious inventiveness deployed to build these buildings and urbanity is therefore invisible on the photographs presented here.
2. In the same way than I did for a past article, I exceptionally decided to reserve all rights when it comes to these photographs (other pictures that I publish on this blog are licensed under creative commons), as I’m wary that their use could be instrumentalized for political ideologies with which I fundamentally disagree. If you would like to use them, feel free to send me an email to ask for authorization (info.funambulistATgmailDOTcom).
This article can be read in the continuity of the one entitled “Mud, Water & Steel: Migrant Bodies, Policed Environment and Humanitarian Architecture in Calais,” published on January 14, 2016. It constitutes an attempt to organize a few thought after a visit to Calais and Dunkirk yesterday. These thoughts do not address the individual and collective experiences of duress of the refugees who currently live in Calais’s so-called “Jungle” and Dunkirk’s Grande Synthe encampment but, rather, the massive deliberate means undertaken by the national and local authorities to write a new chapter of hardship for them. This rejoins an intuition that I have been able to express here in the past: when it comes to refugees, a radical politics that the European Union could adopt is…doing nothing. By this provocative statement, I mean that a significant part of hardship that refugee individuals and families currently experience is due to the various means deployed against them by the European Union (borders, walls, police harassment, and racism) and that the dismantlement of these means would drastically transform their daily lives and endeavors. This is not to say that their flee from various forms of individual and collective persecution should be met with indifference, but simply that the efforts that are currently put in antagonizing migrants and refugees are much greater than the ones necessary to provide adequate welcoming conditions to their temporary or permanent resettling.”
