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Calais France
to be continued
Just as in 2002 with Sangatte's dismantling, the Jungle returns to Calais in its clandestine state as Europe's shadow space >
Recovered drawing Jules Ferry 2016
'Reading the Jungle and its political imagination through the word that names it. A sort of double reading on one of today's most misunderstood subjects. In its evolution the jungle in Calais is uniquely a 21st century political entity that defies easy categorisation. It fuses improvised modes of existence and production of precarious architectures to parallel new globalised realities of human relations. The Jungle, symbolic and real, is many things but we can use its naming as a guide to lead an understanding of its multiple facets.'
from introductory blog at amp
2016
Inevitably Jules Ferry became a focus, and grew into a satellite 'township' of almost ten thousand at its peak.
Like Sangatte, the solution was placed on its dismantling. Jules Ferry was emptied in an operation with hundreds of coaches driven to places far away from Calais.
2012
A great project of fortification began. Calais became synonymous with double and triple razor wire fencing, moats and surveillance cameras. But such fortifications were no defence against the tide of human flow from Syria late 2014 onwards. The authorities then decided on a drastic measure to control numbers - to herd all the disparate jungles into one 'mega Jungle' at a place called Jules Ferry.
The scale of Jules Ferry altered the profile of the Jungle. The Jungle even came to be recognised on satellite by googlemaps. With it, the solidarity and humanitarian work a mega Jungle required to sustain it changed as well. With Jules Ferry came the emergence of hybrid solidarity-humanitarian organisations like Care4Calais and Utopia 56.
The nature and dimensions of the Jungle adapt to the changing realities of its ground. The ground is determined by the geopolitics of a greater order and its inequities that drive migration in the global age.
The Jungle like the Hotspot is a paradigm of space within that. It functions outside of any legal framework for subjects of irregular migration or forced migration. Both the Jungle and the Hotspot are products of the colonial age. They reproduce the relations of coloniality in the twenty first century through inherited structures of migration.
They are not the only such spaces but work in conjunction with other spaces like detention centres - as for example Yards Wood.
2002
After the dismantling of the infamous Sangatte camp by the Eurotunnel then was composed mainly of Iraqi, Afghan and Kosovan refugees, the problem of the jungles of Calais was thought to be resolved. But the underlying need for the jungle remained and so it grew again, in dispersed clandestine places subject to regular raids and evictions by the CRS, the National Security police. For all the police repression, the jungle persisted in encampments and precarious squats with names like Africa House, Palestine House, Sudan House and so on.
Solidarity was equally clandestine. With No Borders from 2009, activist cooks from Kokkerellen in Ghent and the Anarchist Teapot in Brighton arrived to set up guerilla kitchens out of sight of the CRS. These were the days of cat and mouse guerilla operations.
Jungles are marked by extreme precarity and continuous cycles of destruction by the law.
But irrespective of circumstance, the jungle is a place of transition and hope. No amount of oppression can alter the belief that something better and life changing will follow.
The white cliffs of Dover are only 20 miles away.
Jungle: forms of shelter and modes of existence for the undocumented migrant population around Calais and its environs.
Interventions, texts and documentations exploring the Jungle as a political subject.
