ART FOR AID, Calais
Calais Jungle Refugee Camp, Summer 2016 Born from a series of truman show type coincidences, we started working on a snowballing project in the winter of 2015. Along with NGO Jungle Books, award winning photojournalist Miguel Amortegui, film maker Jack Hextall and Voluntry co-ordinator Nic McEwan we took a trip to the Calais Jungle Refugee Camp. We spent a week in the camp running daily street art workshops with the young people, hearing their personal accounts and encouraging them to tell their stories through creative self expression. The project was successully crowdfunded by our generous followers through Kickstarter!
A key part of this project was documenting our time over there, the reality of camp life and the people's stories. Our intention was to bring back as much information as possible in order to curate a large scale exhibition. This will showcase the work we have produced with the young people, our own paintings, as well as written journals, photography and a short film which will all be produced by our selected team. A large proportion of the exhibition profits will go to Jungle Books, the NGO who hosted our recent street art workshops and helped us engage many of the accompanied minors. Jungle Books provides food, education, legal advice, counselling and a safe social space for vulnerable young people in the camp. They survive on donations alone and we want to do everything in our power to help them sustain their work, which is why we created a new website to make it easy to support them.
