Guillaume Poli has been a freelance photographer for six years and collaborates with news agencies. He favors a long term approach with a social bias. Here, he offers us an insight on his pending coverage of migrants transiting towards England.
Calais : The African Migrants House (2010)
The numbers of migrants passing through Calais, France has been increasing since 2002 to a thousand. In the year 2009, with the Jungles being destroyed, the situation became tougher. Lately, another unsetting signal arose in june 2010 with one of the last visible squats in downtown Calais being evacuated.
Informal dwellings are refugees’ fate. Spending one night in an entrance hall or a longer period in a derelict flat, migrants must remain unseen in order to survive in Calais. As the saying goes, “In order to live (almost) happily, live discreetly”.
April of 2010. These are the very last moments at African House, a former sawmill, haven to about forty migrants from Eastern Africa, most of them Sudanese driven out of the Darfour area by the war.
What struck me most was an encounter with two migrants I met on their wandering. Habib, a young Tadjik from Panchir, arrived in France after traveling through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France. He lives alone in a derelict flat in downtown Calais. Mohammed is a Sudanese from Darfour. I spent several days with him, he eventually achieved his aim and reached England.
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