Elisa Larvego’s Chemin des dunes : beyond a critical ethnography of Calais

The ongoing state violence against displaced people in Calais has been the subject of much critical work, in particular since the early 2000s, by photographers such as Bruno Serralongue, Jean Révillard, Jacqueline Salmon, Mathieu Pernot, Marion Osmont, Aimée Thirion, Emin Özmen and others. Their approach to the representation of migration in Calais denounces a system that produces the collective and legalised forms of violence which have been evident in Calais for the last twenty years. Elisa Larvego’s Chemin des dunes (Path to the Dunes) was commissioned in 2016 by CNAP (the National Centre for the Plastic Arts) and PERU (Centre for the Exploration of Urban Resources) for a project entitled ‘Reinventing Calais’. Chemin des dunes – a series of photographs depicting life in the informal camps around Calais – is a central part of this critical countercurrent and refutes the so-called neutrality of the mainstream media. It instead creates an antisystemic cultural response to a system that produces these types of regulated spaces where social and human differentiation are accepted as a new order.