Ville de Calais

In the vicinity of the French harbour city of Calais, a parallel world has existed for more than 10 years. Before being dismantled at the end of 2016, the “Jungle” was the makeshift home that refugees from North and East Africa, the Middle East and beyond, had built for themselves while waiting for a chance to cross the Strait of Dover and reach the UK.

Since 2005 Henk Wildschut has followed the increasing stream of migrants whose journeys end in limbo outside Calais, where the “invisible” people create temporary cities. His work is an amazing study of a temporary city with its own system and daily life, which has made itself functional on simple premises. It is so focused on this little plot of land, a little brick in a much bigger system of geopolitical warfare, aftermath and immigration. The timelines of the different stages of buildings are incredible, spanning from the emerging “Jungle” to its end 10 years later. Tear down the camp and it will get rebuilt a few meters away. This is the story of human resilience. Wildschut has also done a project about the informal garden and newly planted vegetable patches in the refugee camps, which reveals one of the most fundamental instincts humans have when we are settling, whether it be permanent or temporary.

After years of documenting Calais, Henk Wildschut compiled his work into the book and exhibition “Ville de Calais” (2017), which brings together photographs made over a decade of visits to the camp. His approach is strikingly calm and methodical: rather than focusing on sensational images of chaos, he chose to portray the structures, gardens, and small details of everyday life with the same care one might give to a study of architecture or urban development. By doing so, Wildschut challenges the way refugees are often seen - shifting the narrative from victimhood to agency, from disorder to resilience.

The project not only records the physical growth and dismantling of the “Jungle” but also raises questions about visibility and permanence. It highlights how these communities, though labeled “temporary,” developed their own infrastructures and forms of belonging, even while existing under constant threat of erasure. Wildschut has said he was interested in “what people build when they have almost nothing,” and in Calais he found an extraordinary example of human resourcefulness in the face of precarity.

Ultimately, “Ville de Calais” stands as both a visual archive of a camp that no longer exists and a wider reflection on migration, displacement, and the universal need for shelter, stability, and dignity.