I had been volunteering in Calais for various organisations on and off for a year and a half, and every time I came back, I felt the need to share what I see, hear and experience there. I felt so angry about how migrants where portrayed in the media, especially when arriving in the UK from Northern France. I wanted to find to break away from how migrants were portrayed in mainstream media by remembering, documenting and commemorating banal but intimate and relatable conversations.
I was also always inspired by how grass-root organisations were helping so many displaced people in Calais. I found those sketchbooks a few weeks ago and I noticed I was already writing conversations using the second-person narrative I use in Conversations from Calais, so subconsciously I think it was the way that always felt the most natural to me.
When rewriting them for the posters, positioning myself as an insider and representing my voice the volunteer in first person and the anonymous migrants in second-person felt the most natural again, because that is how the conversations happened in real life. Conversations from Calais uses public space to share conversations migrants have had with volunteers in Calais.
It is a way of bearing witness to the experiences of displaced people who are stuck in Calais, who are trying to reach the UK, and who are so often silenced or ignored. This ever-growing collection of conversations focuses on capturing the diversity of experiences and avoids creating new stereotypes of refugees as villains, heroic figures or hopeless victims. By pasting these posters on walls all around the world, we are taking over public space, commemorating these voices and inspiring social change.
I never ever thought this would happen! The only way I can get an idea of their impact is through Instagram, when people write to me saying they saw a poster and found it powerful. One of my favourite aspects of this project is that it is open to collaboration and the way it has developed is influenced by people reaching out and taking different initiatives. For instance, the posters have now been pasted up in more than fifty cities in 5 different continents around the world, which I was never expecting.
