Your Space Or Mine: Conversations From Calais

For this Your Space Or Mine collaboration, we worked with Conversations From Calais. Focusing on what began as a DIY poster project initiated by Mathilda, a longstanding Calais volunteer working to support migrants and refugees, we asked – what first inspired her? “I started Conversations From Calais after volunteering there for several organisations and every time I came back to London, I felt the need to share what I saw, heard and experienced. I felt so angry about how displaced communities were being portrayed in the media, especially when arriving in the UK from Northern France. I wanted to find a way to break away from this by remembering, documenting and commemorating all the different conversations I’d had with displaced people I’d met there. I thought this would be the simplest, rawest and most powerful way to share my experience. And slowly the project grew from there.”

Conversations From Calais bears witness to the multiple challenges facing these refugees and migrants. By recounting and sharing their chats with volunteers so many hitherto invisible, silent voices are recovered. “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 presenting such humbling testaments as posters on walls in cities around the world, Conversations From Calais has imbued public space with a conscience. The walls are talking, and we really should listen to what they have to say. Project founder Mathilda hoped that the posters would offer a counter narrative to the reductive, ignorant, often downright bigoted way that refugees and migrants are represented.

“The situation for displaced people in Calais and all over the world is harrowing and these conversations only portray a glimpse of it. A lot of these conversations describe many injustices and we need to be aware of them. Then it’s up to the individual to decide what to do with this information. My hope is for you to feel angry, frustrated, embarrassed and see no other alternative than fighting with us to change this broken system that only treats some humans as humans. I know not everyone will feel this way, and you may choose to ignore it, but you can’t say you didn’t know.”

With stark black texts on white backs, the sparse design communicated in a matter of fact way the awful precarity experienced by displaced persons. Our Your Space Or Mine project was honoured to offer a helping hand to this project that both sobers and inspires, and whose ethos and actions are summed up in a no nonsense, empathic mandate: be kind, be open, be political, be active, be generous. And amidst the hurt, the Conversations From Calais project catalyses not just awareness but some hope too. 

Asked what especially appealed to her about the project’s expanded Your Space Or Mine display, founder Mathilda commented, “Conversations From Calais started as posters pasted with homemade glue in the streets of Dover, then London and then the rest of the world. The process was a quick, easy and cheap way of getting these conversations read by large numbers of people, without having to go through censorship, curators or publishers. The posters became extensions of our walls, taking over public space and blending in with our cities’ stories. Billboards are the perfect extension of this use of public space, as they inhabit the same spaces but feel bigger in impact because of their size. These conversations cannot be forgotten, they need to be commemorated and for them to be printed the size of a house and put in so many cities around the UK feels like a first step to recognising that we refuse to turn away and forget.” Bravo.

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