The plates of refugees
by Dhamintha Wickremasinghe
The European Immigration crisis has had a significant toll on the city of Calais, which was transformed, from a tourist attraction for the British to a capsulised city of unattractive fences in just a couple of years. Through the revealing of a phenomenon within the city and through following John Hejduk’s artistic methods of research, The plates of Refugees project brings to life a set of characters that have the impetus to tackle the complexity of the situation.
Year: 2020
Type: Collaboration
Author: Dhamintha Wickremasinghe
Photography: Neus Herrera
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
This piece is a fragment of one of the characters that inhabit the city of Calais. Different parts of the object represent stories, historical narratives and well-grounded speculations of the Calaisisan Immigrants. For example, the copy of the statue of the Venus (now presiding in the Louvre), with arms cut off below the guillotine, shows the despair of the female immigrants in Calais amid the sexual and physical assaults they face by the French police; How a country that is regarded as the epitome of achieving human rights have failed to protect the vulnerable in a time of need.
Dhamintha Wickremasinghe, 2020
This piece is a fragment of one of the characters that inhabit the city of Calais. Different parts of the object represent stories, historical narratives and well-grounded speculations of the Calaisisan Immigrants. For example, the copy of the statue of the Venus (now presiding in the Louvre), with arms cut off below the guillotine, shows the despair of the female immigrants in Calais amid the sexual and physical assaults they face by the French police; How a country that is regarded as the epitome of achieving human rights have failed to protect the vulnerable in a time of need.
Dhamintha Wickremasinghe, 2020
