It began in 2015, with a simple intention: to help. To do something, Anything.

I could never have imagined, in that moment, how deeply that place would imprint itself on me, its mud, its people, its contradictions, its shame, and its resilience.

I had a feeling in me that I didn’t want to stand on the sidelines; I wanted to act. But maybe it was just curiousity.
I was naïve. I hadn’t done much research. I didn’t even know exactly where the camp was, it was just what I had heard on the news. Within an hour after arriving I had my first expeiance with pepper spray.

I met a group of young men from Sudan near a truck, each truck was a possible route to a new life in the UK. That was when the police came, my first experience with tear gas. The Sudanese men helped me clean my eyes and offered me a place to sleep in a tent after I told them why I was there. It was my first experience on the ground what quickly would grow out to the biggest slump of Western Europe.

After that first visit to Calais, I learned from my experiences, naivety had disappeared like snow in the burning sun by the hardness I experienced. I remember thinking: “if I go again? Can I do something useful? ” I didn’t had a direct answer. But later thinking about the mud, the water what flooded tents there was something I could do.
When I returned, I brought shovels I had collected through a radio appeal on Radio Drenthe, (a regional station in the north of the Netherlands).
I thought shovels would be useful in the mud. But not long after I arrived, the French police confiscated half of them. I managed to hide the rest. That was a new lesson: even acts of help could be seen as suspect, and gestures could be intercepted before they reached their destination.

The Jungle was an area of improvisation, a community stitched together from hope and whatever could be found. 
It grew fast: from a few tents into a an area with shops, made from pallets and tarpaulin even restaurants a mosque, a church, a school, a library. It was humanity’s instinct to live, concentrated in one muddy field, a former landfill in the dunes.

I saw sadness and joy.
I saw the worst of humanity, and the most beautiful in mankind.
The Jungle, the largest slum in Western Europe, both a disgrace and a testament to survival.

I felt shame, confusion, and an uneasy awareness of my privilege.
Could I even write about this? I kept asking myself.
Am I allowed to?
It sometimes felt like trespassing, a kind of neo-colonial voyeurism, even when my intentions were good.


2015–2016:

Chaos and creation. The camp grew every day. The “shopping street” expanded: one day a new bakery made from pallet wood and tarpaulin, the next day a barber shop, a new restaurant. 
A fragile and strange sense of normality emerged. 
They called it the Calais Jungle, but in truth it was a small village, one of the most alive places I have ever seen. A place built on hope.

Hope could vanish quickly. The air often filled with tear gas; people were injured by rubber bullets. There were fights with police, and also between groups within the camp, using poles, knives, whatever was at hand.

It wasn’t just the camp, the whole region felt charged. Migrants blocked highways, trying to stop trucks heading for the harbour, hoping to climb inside and hide.
Once, I witnessed a group of more than a hundred people storm the fences around the Channel Tunnel entrance, Desperation filled the air, shouts in the dark, the flashing blue of police lights, the sirens. It was chaos, but also clarity: borders exposed as lines of confrontation.

Then came the night of November 13, 2015, the night of the Paris attacks. That same night, a fire tore through part of the camp. The smell of burning plastic mixed with fear. It wasn’t close to the tragedy in Paris, but it was belonged to the same dark night. 

When the camp was demolished at the end of 2016, I kept returning. The settlement what I had seed grown to nearly 10,000 people in less than two years, wasn’t there anymore. but I couldn’t let it simply vanish. I began collecting fragments: toothbrushes, shoes, parts of tents, scraps of foil blankets, even a rubber bullet.
Like souvenirs from Calais.

I use that word Souvenirs deliberately. Souvenir means “to remember,” but in this case also something that makes people uncomfortable. They are artefacts of a present past,reminders of a time and place the world prefers to forget.

Souvenirs

Back in my studio, I didn’t see waste, I saw witnesses.
Each fragment I collected carried a story: a life in limbo, a journey interrupted, a night survived.

A toothbrush became a relic of endurance; a shoe, a symbol of distance walked; a tear gas canister, an artefact of the violence of borders.

These weren’t simply found objects. They were the physical traces of something larger, a system, a failure, and persistence.
They are what remain when policy meets humanity.

Ten years of return,

What began as volunteering has become a ten-year project.
It’s not just about Calais, it’s about what Calais represents: the fragile boundary between safety and exclusion, between visibility and invisibility.

The project seeks to reflect the human stories behind the statistics, to show the complexity and dignity of people living on the edge of Europe, caught between two worlds.

It’s about two perspectives of the same crossing, like the Channel itself, both border and bridge.
The refugee, the police officer, the volunteer, the truck driver, the local resident, they are all part of the same ecosystem, all navigating the same geography from radically different angles.

Every time returning to Calais it feels like I’m returning to an open wound.

Where one’s was the big camp, the Calais jungle the only things that remember are traces: graffiti on a viaduct, a surveillance camera on a pole, a toothbrush in the sand.
Today, the camps are scattered across north of Pas-de-Calais, from the Belgian border to Boulogne-sur-Mer. more fragmented, less visible.

October 23 2024 three people drowned trying to cross to the UK, three from a group I had spoken to the day before.
That same day, the realisation of the loss of lives just sinking in, the police cleared most of the small camp where I had met them. The next morning, before dawn, they returned and dismantled what was left, including the tents I had bought to replace the ones taken away the day before.
those tents were visible hope and a fragile shelter against relentless weather.

That week broke something in me. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed death in Calais, nor the first time I’d seen a camp destroyed. But this time felt different.

Once again, I was a spectator, carrying my privilege like a passport and a burden.

The Weight of Small Things

I found a child’s sock in the mud of the cleared camp
It was pink, I remember the children from the day before

I brought it back home to the studio and couldn’t stop looking at it.
That sock is a work on its own: The Impossibility of Guilt in the Shadow of Displacement.

Such a tiny object, yet it carried everything, innocence, loss, distance, fragility.
Every thread a story; every stain geography.
These relics are not metaphors. They are evidence, physical residue of policies, borders, fears, and human endurance.

Reflection

It’s been ten years now.
Ten years since I first stepped into that muddy former landfill just outside Calais.
Ten years of returning, collecting, helping, doubting, making, remembering.

Calais has become a mirror, reflecting on the world, the inequality but also my own position, my privilege, my contradictions.
I am both witness and intruder. I can leave whenever I want, I can take a the ferry to the Uk, I can cross borders without any problem.

I believe art can hold complexity. It can create empathy without sentimentality, protest without shouting.
It can keep stories alive when politics tries to bury them.

I know I can’t change the situation. But I can bear witness.
I can keep fragments alive.
I can turn them into surfaces that resist erasure, reminders that these stories are not finished.

Maybe ten years is enough.
Maybe not.

Each time, I find myself walking along the same route from Calais to Sangatte, collecting again peace’s of life blankets from the dunes.

They still shimmer, even when torn.
And perhaps that shimmer, fragile, almost gone is what art is meant to preserve.

So I keep walking, collecting, and listening.
Because doing nothing adds nothing to humanity.
And because sometimes, the smallest act, a new tent, something to eat, is enough to keep hope alive, at least for one more night.


Johannes Harm Hovinga

2015–2025