'Make it personal' art project. Sophie Hemery.
“Jungles are for animals! We are humans!” We would hear and see this phrase time and again, evidence of a population aware of the fragility of their humanity, at the centre of a geopolitical storm which every day threatens to wrest it away, distort it or replace it with fears and statistics. What we saw, in the place they call the ‘Jungle’, was not humanity trapped in abject despair, nor lasciviously eyeing our benefit system across the Channel. We saw instead community and solidarity - with foundations in the kind of simple acts that unite rather than divide. We drank tea warmed on firewood with a group of Pakistanis, shared snacks under tarpaulin, talked cricket, and joked. A Kuwaiti showed us the winter jacket he bought in Dunkirk. There were shops and bars, mosques and churches; people played football and charged their phones.
Why should such prosaic events seem striking? In the UK’s mainstream media, we have seen the crisis from above, in aerial photographs of amorphous, shifting sprawls, shanty towns in the heart of Europe. And zoomed in, painfully close, in the tragedy of a small boy's death on a Turkish beach. Such images attempt to hammer the crisis home, but they do not constitute real empathy rooted in a genuine sense of shared humanity and contextualised understanding. They paint a one-dimensional picture, reducing people to blotches on the landscape or to an individual tragedy; taking humans and turning them into ‘migrants’. This imagery of displaced people also displaces people from their histories, personal and political.
