This is an unpublished project premiered today on C41 Magazine.
Nico Lethbridge recently graduated from Durham University with a history degree. Relationships with the past influence his work enormously and he looks for ways to visually represent otherwise forgotten historical narratives. He is based near London in the UK but has travelled extensively across Asia, Europe, and North America. This project was made during a recent month-long stay in Calais where he was volunteering with refugees.
About ‘Beyond the Garden Walls’ – words by Nico Lethbridge:
December, 2020, Calais, France
Within the context of the refugee crisis in Northern France, ‘Beyond the Garden Walls’ attempts to convey the exclusion felt by the thousands of people taking refuge there. Refused acceptance to either French or British society they are shut out and faced with the impersonality of rejection. Hedges, fences, and walls seem to turn into battlements. Windows become arrow-slits, every shutter a portcullis and the invisible owners are hidden somewhere inside.
This imagery is taken from my experience serving food to refugees in Calais. Hot meals were distributed in front of a fort which was originally built to protect the English-owned Calais from invaders. Though it is now defunct its symbolism remains pertinent. On a clear day, Dover’s white cliffs are visible and seem to be almost within touching distance. Like walls themselves they rise out of a moat that has claimed the lives of numerous migrants. Metaphors such as these are ubiquitous in the face of the government resistance to the thousands encamped here.
The aim of ‘Beyond the Garden Walls’, however, is to remind us that we are all implicated in this. The fortress like hedges, fences and walls show us that it is not only governments who build borders and barricades but us individuals too. It is up to us to remove those barriers and welcome with open arms those currently shut out in the cold and the mud.
