TEN YEARS ON
Calais. 21.10.26
During the Refugee Crisis in Europe in 2015, several thousand people displaced on the France-UK border took temporary shelter in a large makeshift refugee camp in Calais. Known as The Jungle, the camp was completely cleared in late October 2016, exactly ten years ago.
Art Refuge worked in the Jungle camp over a 15 month period with Médecins du Monde and Meédecins sans Frontières. To mark the ten year anniversary of its closure, today we visited the original site of the camp, now a large nature reserve. Any semblance of the camp’s existence has been erased, except for a large piece of recent graffiti on a World War Two bunker holding the words SAFE TRIP TO UK, the letters ‘UK’ indistinct, appearing to have been almost scrubbed out.
People hoping to find asylum in the UK have since been living in and around Calais in intensely challenging and hostile conditions, surviving in small informal living sites, largely hidden.
For the past decade, Art Refuge has continued to work in the town with The Community Table. Today we once again took the table to @calais.exilessc . The Autumnal weather was changeable, with sunshine and rain.
The table was busy and well used all afternoon. A number of young men spent several hours with us, from Sudan, Chad, Eritrea... taking their time to build, paint their flag, or type out lengthy texts from the little Migration book on the manual typewriter. Care, patience and kindness were shown around the table in abundance.
Various volunteers came to join in, while three religious sisters came over to observe the activity. One young man proudly showed us the lush hills and waterfalls of his homeland; another spoke of his shattered dreams. A third joined us with a broken arm, playfully opening ‘The Free People Hotel’ and welcoming us, in his role as receptionist. This was after a long process of making a small brick building with his non-dominant hand, patiently and slowly transforming it from a house to a stable to its final form.
Words by Bobby Lloyd & Miriam Usiskin.
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