"At a moment where Nicolas Sarkozy wants French people to think that Asterix is their ancestor, they might want to think of the besieged village of the Calais “Jungle” as the one resisting the evil oppressor."
The Village in an Increasingly Militarized Area: Photographic Report of a Third Visit to Calais
▻http://thefunambulist.net/2016/09/21/the-village-in-an-increasingly-militarized-area-photographic-report-
“This visit happened a few days after French Ministry of Interior Bernard Cazeneuve met with Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart, vowing to demolish the so-called “Jungle” and relocate its residents in various hosting centers throughout the country. Such announcement came a few days after another one, made by Robert Goodwill, the Immigration Minister of the new Theresa May UK government: two weeks ago, he announced that a new 4-meter tall wall was about to be built in Calais along the highway leading to the port — the construction started yesterday. This comes as an additional layer of militarization of the port’s vicinity that already counts numerous police cars, CCTV cameras and two to three layers of 4-meter tall barbed wire fences (see photographs below). The cynicism that consists in investing millions of euros/pounds into these drastic policing measures and their violence, rather than offering accommodation to the thousands who fled war — an important amount of the “Jungle” residents are now coming from Darfour — or other extremely dire situations, reach new levels with the construction of this wall, which is planned to be dressed with “plants and flowers on one side to reduce its visual impact on the local area” (source: The Guardian).
My arguments on the matter have not changed (see the report of the first trip►http://thefunambulist.net/2016/02/04/police-fences-and-containers-a-photographic-report-from-calais-jungl, as well as of the second one▻http://thefunambulist.net/2016/04/21/report-from-calais-and-grande-synthe-two-political-architectures-of-): our position should be less articulated in humanitarian terms than in political ones. The premise of such a position consists in the categorical denial that the situation constitutes a crisis, on the contrary of what is described at length through the press and politician (left and right) speeches. The only crisis there is, is the one displaced persons themselves are experiencing. The second premise of this position is another refusal: one that goes against the collective Western imaginary that consider displaced persons as a negative currency, disincarnated statistics whose winner is the one that gets the least of it. It also turns around the liberal critique: the Calais’ “Jungle” is not a place symptomatic of the lack of action of the French and UK States, which makeshift dwellings never reached a satisfying level of comfort and dignity because of their residents’ lack of skills: it is a place symptomatic of the actual action of the French and UK States, which makeshift dwellings never reached a satisfying level of comfort of dignity because of the way their residents have been consistently prevented to undertake the construction of a proper urban entity.”
