EXHIBITION LAUNCH: “WE ARE IN BETWEEN”
What is the situation for migrants in Northern France after the destruction of the camps in Calais and Dunkirk in October 2016 and April 2017? What are their stories and experiences of living in informal settlements in the woods? This exhibition relays, in text and still and moving image, some of the narratives of the migrants we met in Calais and Dunkirk in September 2017.
These are stories of hardship, fear and exhaustion but also of friendship, community and hope - “just one more border” to cross. The stories convey the experience, aftermath, anticipation and the “in-between” of violence. Migrants showed us the aftermath of a police raid - their shelters and belongings destroyed - whilst enduring the continued violences of daily life and anticipating the next police intervention. They were recovering from the last attempt to cross the border and waiting for their next opportunity. They narrated a borderland of both physical violence and the structural violence of hardship, waiting and profound uncertainty.
What is left behind after the police has intervened, or, more accurately, what happens in the moments in-between - of waiting; of anticipating violence; of preparing to cross the border?
And, what happens when hiding becomes a mode of being? Hiding from police; hiding your true story because no one believes you or because you cannot tell your family back home what life in Europe is like? What happens when survival is dependent on careful tactics of staying out of sight and becoming visible in the right place and time? What happens in a zone of irregularity, in which your legal status is unclear as are the (il)legality of the practices of surveillance and violence you experience?