LĂŠopold Lambert
When confronted with the circumstance of migrants and refugees in Europe, those of us who oppose the nationalist politics currently propelling the actions of a majority of the governments in the European Union usually formulate two kinds of critiques. The first is a call for humanitarianism: blaming the State for doing too little, and appealing to human rights or western values in a plea to shelter people out of pity or empathy. The second is more sophisticated: trying to alter the sinister narrative dictating the manner in which the circumstance is usually described, instead extolling the potential offered by the arrival of creative and resourceful people in an aging Europe, sometimes going as far as referring to the makeshift towns built by the displaced people on their journeys as “a laboratory of the future city”. Although I myself find more affinities with this second vision (which I have deliberately simplified here), I would like to propose a third way to consider the circumstance – one that neither takes pity on nor romanticizes people whose only common characteristic is being the target of violence by the European states. The photographs presented in this book help in this sense in that each of them speaks about this violence – to whomever is prepared to listen. There is of course the violence of displacement itself: the wars, the great economic precariousness that pushed people to undertake this perilous, sometimes deadly journey towards Europe in the first place. Whether this journey is accomplished by overcoming dangers across the sea or numerous obstacles over land, after experiencing its brutality nobody who has dared it emerges the same person. Europe likes to think that it bears no responsibility in the underlying and antecedent violence, conveniently forgetting the indelible mark left by decades – if not indeed centuries – of colonialism in the
countries fled: Syria and Mali (France); Eritrea, Libya and Somalia (Italy); Nigeria, Sudan and Iraq (United Kingdom). Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain – none of the countries of Western Europe (with the exception of Ireland perhaps) can claim innocence when it comes to colonialism and the associated plundering of resources and sheer human exploitation. There are other layers of violence that become visible in the photographs of Calais. One of them is obvious: the kilometres of multi-layered white wall that separate the motorway to the port from its surroundings, including the makeshift town built by its 10,000 residents between 2015 and 2016. Although this wall is relatively punctual from a geographic standpoint, the militarized zone it creates around the interfacial infrastructure that the port of Calais incarnates effectively makes it an international border barrier between France and the United Kingdom, to the same extent as the militarized walls around the Spanish (colonial) enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, or the ones between Hungary and Serbia or between the United States and Mexico. Throughout the book, the presence of this wall is ubiquitous, including its rolls of barbed wire and surveillance apparatus, blending cutting-edge military technology with the ageless mechanism that the wall constitutes. The police vans that readers can see in some of the vignettes constitute another layer of violence – it was hard to be anywhere in the makeshift town without catching sight of one of them in the background. Contrary to the idea that “the state does not do enough”, in fact 150,000 euros a day was constantly spent solely on the rotational stationing of 750 police officers on site. During the day, the police’s role usually consisted in maintaining a
monitoring and at times threatening presence around the town. At night, they spotted, prevented and arrested (and regularly beat up, tear-gassed and insulted) people trying to board the lorries en route to England in a somehow paradoxical attempt to prevent those they did not want to host in the first place from leaving the country. The two pages preceding and the two following this text, which present photographs of the camp erected by the French state in January 2016, composed of 125 containers, also clearly show the political violence of this architecture. Implied in it are the evictions and destruction of a part of the makeshift town undertaken to provide the space for the camp itself. Implied is also the fencing of the camp and its highly securitized entrance, where the authorized bodies it “hosts� have to funnel through a palm-recognition device in order to be allowed to enter. What the photographs explicitly show lies elsewhere. First, it is the deliberate absence of any form of a social sphere within the camp, contrasting with the lively streets of the makeshift town surrounding it. The spaces between the containers are rigidly restricted from generating any aspects of urbanity: any activity that does not relate to the simple displacement in and out of the camp and between the containers is reprimanded. And then there are the containers themselves. Like the wall, they are painted in a clinical white, perhaps revealing the way the French state views the exiles through the prism of an imaginary pandemic that needs to be quarantined. The 14-square-metre containers are sparsely furnished with six double bunk beds and twelve lockers, again an iteration of mono-functional space, in this case for the bare necessity of sleeping. The container embodies an architecture of statistics. It is the materialization of the most elemental volume and
its six surfaces (four walls, one floor, one ceiling). The system in which it is a cog cares very little about what it contains, be it commercial goods, vehicles, weapons or, in this case, human beings. As such, it provides the ergonomic infrastructure of an economy usually reserved for inanimate objects. As far as the European politics of immigration are concerned, this economy is based on real lives: people are reduced to statistics, or worse, a type of negative currency that governments reluctantly distribute between themselves or haggle over with other countries, such as Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Libya, in order to externalize their treatment or detention. Encountering containers as shelters in Calais is thus unsurprising. They enable the illusion of a compassionate provision of accommodation, a benevolence quantifiable and provable in the numbers housed, while at the same time architecturally notifying their “residents�, and equally to those who witness them, that they are anything but welcome. Moreover, the deployment of containers is, if one will, an architectural Freudian slip, their ad-hoc nature revealing the French state’s deep urge to be able to immediately move the people they confine should the opportunity occur. What remains are the photographs of the homes of the makeshift town. The two critiques described at the beginning of the text view the phenomenon in two radically different lights. While the humanitarian stance perceives only the misery and the hardship experienced by the people who have to live in these cold, dark and muddy shelters, the effusive stance focuses only on the creativity employed by the residents to build, from the ground up, what was their own town, replete with social and commercial spaces (schools, churches, mosques, restaurants, etc.). My conviction, however, is
that photographs of these makeshift buildings should be seen in precisely the same way as the ones featuring the walls, police vans and containers. The architecture of these buildings materializes the violence of what they are prevented from being. In other words, this makeshift place is by no means symptomatic of inaction by the French and British authorities, where the dwellings fail to reach a satisfactory level of comfort and dignity because of their residents’ lack of skills or resources. Instead the place is symptomatic of the deliberate actions of the French and the British states, where the dwellings fail to reach a satisfactory level of comfort of dignity because of the ways in which their residents are consistently prevented from undertaking the construction of a proper urban entity. As such, the town is probably less “the laboratory of the future city� and much more the materialization of a critical point of resistance erected to counter the aforementioned violence. Recognized as such by the French state, it was completely destroyed in October 2016, adding yet another episode of forced displacement and state violence to the lives of the thousands of residents who had fled from these very forces in the first place.
1993 The Sangatte Protocol comes into force; an agreement between France and the UK providing for reciprocal border checkpoints at the Channel Tunnel, set up and manned by France at Cheriton in Kent and the UK at Coquelles in France. December 1999 Opening of the Sangatte centre, due to the increasing numbers of refugees who are sleeping rough. The camp, which is run by the Red Cross, is housed in a giant warehouse that had previously been used as a storage site for the concrete lining elements of the Channel Tunnel. February 2002 Closure of the official Sangatte refugee camp at the behest of the British government following a tabloid media campaign. 2003 The French and British governments sign the Treaty of Le Touquet, providing for what are termed “juxtaposed” border controls. Entry to the UK is henceforth regulated on French soil. September 2009 Forceful clearing of the so-called “Pashtun Jungle” by French riot police. The original “Big Jungle”, it was an informal settlement housing around 1,000 Afghans, the term “jungle” coming from the Pashtun word Dzhangal, which means forest. 278 Afghans who refuse to leave are arrested; half of them are under 18. Autumn 2012 SALAM occupation. Following the breaking-up of numerous prior squats, sans-papiers (refugees without documents) start sleeping in the SALAM charity food distribution point in the Calais old town near the port. Police subsequently evict the occupiers on 26 September.
Spring 2013 So-called “legal squat” at the Rue Caillette in Calais, initiated by the No Borders network. The squat is tolerated by the authorities. August 2013 Some 500 refugees begin building makeshift camps in the port area of Calais, resulting in the appearance of “micro-jungles” in the middle of the town. September 2014 NATO security fencing and renewed British tabloid hysteria. Amidst a new wave of hysteria about the situation in Calais, stoked up by the conservative press in the UK, the British government announces its intention to re-deploy the security fence erected for the recent NATO summit in Newport, Wales. (The newly built perimeter barrier is blown down by high winds, once on 27 December and again in January 2015.) 15 January 2015 Partial opening of the Jules Ferry Day Centre. The previous food distribution point in the centre of Calais is shut down. From now on all services are provided around the Jules Ferry Day Centre, located six kilometres outside the town. March–April 2015 Migrants are instructed to move to the “Jungle”. Police visit all existing squats and camps telling people to move to a single authorised area, hence the prefix “official”. Consisting of an old waste dump near the Jules Ferry Day Centre, the shift marks the beginning of the new “Jungle”. June 2015 All refugees living in makeshift sites in the town centre are evicted. Fort Galloo and other settlements in the town are cleared; the final residents are forced to move to the Jules Ferry “Jungle”.
August 2015 Largely financed by the UK, security fences are built along the motorway past Calais, both adjoining the “Jungle” and beyond. September 2015 The Eurotunnel firm clears 103 hectares of trees in order to improve surveillance. In December the company goes as far as to flood the terrain adjacent to the tunnel entrance. October 2015 Around 700 sans-papiers and their supporters overrun the Calais ferry port, which is shut down for several hours. November 2015 A French court orders the Lille municipal government to organise rubbish collection and install access to drinking water and toilet facilities in the “Jungle”. The ruling is issued as a result of an administrative complaint by two charities. January 2016 Partial eviction of the “Jungle” begins, designed to create a 100-metre-wide “no-man’s-land” between the camp and the motorway. Hundreds of people are displaced. By this point state authorities are in the process of constructing a closed camp inside the existing “Jungle”, designed to house 1,500 residents. Entrance to the fenced-off area is restricted to registered persons, access being controlled by means of a fingerprint scanner. February 2016 The south zone of the “Jungle” is forcibly cleared following a failed legal appeal by humanitarian organisations to stop the action. March 2016 Several activists from Iran stage a hunger strike calling for human rights to be respected and an end to evictions in the “Jungle”.
September 2016 According to figures from humanitar ian organisations, the “Jungle” houses over 10,000 residents. September 2016 Work on the so-called “Anti-Intrusion Wall” commences, consisting of an extension of the already existing fences around the border zone. October 2016 Clearance and demolition of the Calais “Jungle” camp. Some 6,400 people are forcibly resettled in different regions of France. October 2016 The municipality of Calais halts construction of the Anti-Intrusion Wall on the grounds that the four-metre-high structure obstructs views of a natural landscape of national interest. June 2017 France’s highest administrative court rules that the Calais regional author ities must provide hundreds of refugees with drinking water, showers and toilets. Humanitarian organisations count around 750 refugees sleeping rough in and around Calais. July 2017 The site of the former “Jungle” is turned into a nature reserve in a measure designed to compensate for extensions to the Calais port. August 2017 According to humanitarian organisations, some 1,000 refugees are sleeping rough in Calais.
They’ve Made Us Ghosts Christoph Oeschger Concept/Editing/Design Christof Nüssli, Christoph Oeschger, Chiara Zarotti Texts Léopold Lambert (A Geography of Violence: The Refugee Town and What it is Prevented From Being) Christoph Oeschger (Timeline) Scans Dominik Zietlow Copy-editing Thomas Skelton-Robinson Proofreading Thomas Skelton-Robinson Lindsay Blair Howe Printing Graphius (Ghent) First Edition 600 copies Publisher cpress (Zurich), cpress.ch Distribution Worldwide: Idea Books (Amsterdam), ideabooks.nl Switzerland: cpress (Zurich), cpress.ch ISBN 978-3-9524710-2-9 Supported by Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur Stadt Zürich Kultur Volkart Foundation Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung, Zurich Georg und Jenny Bloch Stiftung
Content The photographs in this book were taken between June 2016 and August 2017 by Christoph Oeschger. The technical images (PMMWI, Thermal Imaging) originate from advertisments of the producers of the cameras, from tutorial PDFs showing how to operate the machines or from information broschures about the French border. The images might be staged. The title is a quote from a resident of the camp, describing his situation in Calais. Texts and photographs under the cre ative commons licence: CC-BY-NC-SA creativecommons.org Christoph Oeschger thanks Everyone who welcomed me at the camp, and Andreas Bertschi Calais Research Michael Clegg Léopold Lambert Armin Linke Felix Mittelberger Gianna Molinari Christin Müller Lolo Nägeli Christof Nüssli Family Oeschger Ramzy Yallah Mouvement Thomas Skelton-Robinson Jules Spinatsch Nedel T. and friends Valentino Velazquez Tobias Wootton Chiara Zarotti Dominik Zietlow
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