It’s been three years since the Calais Jungle in France was torn apart by French authorities. A selection of artists, including Anish Kapoor, are creating new work using materials rescued from the camp to aid various charities that help refugees and migrants.
The Calais camp was home to approximately 10,000 refugees – the French authorities had the camp destroyed in 2016, hurling teargas and brutally assaulting people who lived in the camp in the process. In July 2017, NGO Human Rights Watch published a report titled Like Living in Hell, which documented the human rights abuses by the police against children and adult migrants in the area.
Alongside Kapoor are other artists including Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller, Sara Shamma, Sean Scully, and Mark Wallinger, who have all used crayons and pencils recovered from local schools found in the razed debris by Migrate Art charity founder Simon Butler. The pieces will all be auctioned off to raise money for the charities at Phillips’ New Now auction, and will be on display at the London auction house throughout March 2019.
The proceeds from the sale will be shared among several charities, with 90 per cent going equally to RefuAid, Refugee Community Kitchen, the Lotus Flower, and the Worldwide Tribe. The remaining 10 percent will go toward future projects organised by Migrate Art.
In 2019, Kapoor pledged $1 million in prize money he had won as a recipient of the ‘Jewish Nobel Prize’, the Genesis Prize, to aid Syrian refugees.
The exhibition of all the works to be auctioned will take place at 9 Cork Street from March 20 to 31 – you can register to attend.