@ Julie Rebouillat,No Border Calais, manif, 27 June 2009
Refugees in Calais find shelter where they can, in spaces left abandoned or neglected by French citizens. Some sleep in the park or under the canal bridges. Most live in one of two kinds of dwellings: (a) squats in deserted buildings, of which there are many in the post-industrial landscape of the town; and (b) the ‘jungles’ or camps made up of tents and makeshift shelters on disused sites and wasteland, usually around the outskirts of the town.
These settlements are not just shelters, but homes. Here people sleep; eat; sit and drink coffee around the fire; play cards; read and study; listen to and play music; dance; wash their clothes; welcome newcomers and visitors; and share food, water, tobacco, conversation, and each others’ company. But this life is under constant threat. Police raid the squats and jungles every day and night. A particular settlement may be left alone for two or three days, but never for long. Or it may be targeted with repeated visits, and attacked multiple times in one night.
These raids raise a number of questions as to their legality. Under French law, the police normally require permission from the owner and/or occupants in order to enter a property, or, failing this, a warrant from the court. CMS activists have witnessed and documented quite literally hundreds of police raids in Calais. We believe that the vast majority of these may have been carried out without authority.
Besides arresting people, when police officers raid they frequently slash or flatten tents; smash windows; throw away or contaminate water; spray bedding with CS gas; and generally destroy or take peoples’ personal belongings. This is an everyday reality. During bigger raids, council workers accompany the police to demolish buildings; confiscate tents and belongings in trucks; and/or spray disinfectant and other chemicals, on possessions, including on bedding.
In particularly nasty incidents, activists have returned to Africa House following major raids to find that bedding had been damaged and urinated on, and that walls had been daubed with what appears to be Neo-Nazi graffiti. We have also witnessed damage to Muslim prayer spaces and the desecration of holy books, including a Tigrinyan Bible, and the Koran.
Along with beatings, arrests and identity checks in the street, these raids contribute to a constant state of fear for refugees in Calais. This in itself has obvious effects on peoples’ mental health and well-being. Yet raids further undermine bodily and mental health by making it impossible to create stable and hygienic living conditions. For example, since cooking utensils as well as food supplies are regularly stolen or destroyed, it becomes near impossible for migrants to feed themselves adequately.
Finally, to add to the pressure, police employ what can only be described as tactics of psychological warfare, such as repeated nightime visits with sirens, bright torches and loud music.
Full document compiled by Calais Migrant Solidarity of the No Borders network, documenting police violence from June 2009 to June 2011 can be found here
“The photographic work of Laurence Demaison is exclusively made of self-portraits. Since 1994, she has made of her body and her face the subjects and the objects of the photographic exploration to which she is dedicated with obstinacy. Through the various series, she tries out the means which photography offers to dissimulate, to transform, to deteriorate her own image. There is in her work, a sensitive and singular course, almost obsessional. And her steps are perhaps a lucid and reflected search for identity whose complexity is only a sequence of questions which Laurence Demaison is asking herself. She maintains an attraction-repulsion to her own body which generates a strange fascination in the spectator.”
« The forms and things appears to someone who is not attached to his own being. In its motion, it is like water, in his rest he is like a mirror, and in his answers, he is like an echo. » Lao Tzu
This sentence illustrates the depth of the work of Vincent Bergerat, where others do not exceed the original meaning of representation, his poetry is to go tracing the invisible things behind things and we implying as the resonance of a time already lived or to come. His work is mysterious but we finally share intimacy, its moments of full and empty are not foreign to us because they are the thread that connects us.
The great mastery of the signifiant is reminiscent of the great classical masters, with a photographic tribute to the ancient Hermetic thought which salvation is by knowledge: know themselves, recognize themselves as being made of light and life.
«I do not have photos, stuffed animals, or notebooks of poetry from my childhood.The only thing I have left is one of dresses. This dress is the most beautiful of that period, the one I wore to birthday parties, piano concerts. A princess or model child dress, each little girl at some point had one, or dreamt of having one. Years later, in Paris, I get ready to go out and for the first time since I was ten, I decide to wear it. It is big enough to slip into, too tight to take off, I find myself stuck inside it.Like Alice in Wonderland, I became little again.
Lolitas? Women Child ? Eternal little girls? Will we always replay the same story?
Inversion, confusion, perturbation, how to deal with these uncertainties? Are these equivoqual travesties the only perspective for women today? I wanted to see how other girls would feel inside my dress, what it would reveal.
I invented a game with one rule: You want to play little girl
You will come to my place
Try a child’s dress on
You will face yourself in a mirror,
And you will pose in front of a white background.
You will look at the camera lens,
You will try to remember the way you were as a little girl,
And you will stand still,
While the picture is taken.
Later I will show you the contact sheet,
and I will give you one of the pictures .»
«Corrélations is a series of photographs which portray the daily life of a woman living alone with her child throughout several years during different seasons. Each picture depicts a moment, an interaction, between the little girl and her mother. As they are self-portraits, there is no spontaneity in the photographs, they are all set up and very organized. The shutter release is held in my hand, visible to the spectator in order to indicate the shooting moment, The decisive moment. Even if the photographs seem very silent, they reveal the bond that exists between a mother and her child. The beautiful enigma of the immutable bond. They also reveal the hard task of being alone with a child, the elsewhere, the outside, the World and the invisible solitude that we barely mention. Love. I wanted to show all those little intimate and harmless things that we are repeating everyday and which we like to call life… I felt the need to photograph them in order to be displayed, to be seen and to be looked upon as an attempt to file time. The time of this woman with her child. Women’s time… »
“There are interstices in time, moments when time is suspended, lasting only a few seconds; each one a fragment of eternity. Such is the calm before the storm : the tension is palpable- in the air, in our faces, in objects themselves : as if at that moment the whole delicate poise of the world was in jeopardy.”
“J’ai tenté de raccrocher plusieurs photographies à un thème : les écrans. C’est un peu un fourre-tout, je me sers des sens multiples du mot. J’ai du mal avec les séries. Il y a quelque chose de très volontaire qui me dérange. Je préfère les variations plus libres (qui peuvent être tout aussi parlantes que les séries). J’avance très doucement dans le choix, il y a quelques certitudes et beaucoup de doutes. C’est dans ces périodes mouvantes que j’aurais besoin d’un oeil extérieur rigoureux et bienveillant …”
“Comment peut-on encore photographier un corps féminin?
Je voulais faire une photo non aphrodisiaque d’un corps de femme. Aller vers un anti-érotique simple (qui ne soit pas de la répulsion), c’est à dire installer dans ce corps de la raideur noble, évacuer les cambrures et les effets artificiels. Trouver une niche où le corps quoique à demi-nu ne déclenche plus ces désirs identiques. Voir s’il était possible de photographier un corps, pour reprendre l’expression de Bourdieu qui ne veut plus s’exposer à l’objectivité des regards et aux discours des autres, qui ne soit plus un corps-pour-autrui. “
“In 2007, Estelle Hanania went to a remote mountainous part of Switzerland to take ambiguous and challenging images of an actual Embodied Nature. For days, she tagged along a group of a dozen of men, wearing incredible suits, patiently handmade by them along the months before the event and the procession. She mingled with this plant-human crossover cortege and followed them on their customary walk from one barn to the next farm, singing and dancing to the point of exhaustion.
The photographer’s interest for folk cultures and customs is also an important part of her still-life work over the years.
Organic surfaces ready to absorb you, hybrid artifacts of worships and traditional rituals all report for lost civilizations and vanishing customs.”
“Il se peut que l’onde d’un choc, si terrible soit-il, défie le temps, et soit d’un coup perceptible avant le drame : comme si l’écho, devenu fou, faisait des voyages insensés dans tous les recoins du temps ; craquelant le passé, inventant même des failles en cisaillant le cœur, donnant à la souffrance une place capitale qu’il n’a pas désiré : le choc invente aussi des feux, révélant des signes annonciateurs qui sont sans visages, sans signification, mais infiltrés dans la tête comme des rumeurs noires ; impossible de les nier, impossible de les déchiffrer, mais avant la chute, le monde a déjà vacillé, et après elle, il porte doublement le poids du temps qui s’est effondré dans le silence.”
@ Julie Rebouillat,No Border Calais, manif, 27 June 2009
