Mathilda Della Torre

Featured Book

Conversations from Calais is a global art project which documents the conversations between volunteers and refugees in poster form – these purely typographic posters are then pasted on city walls around the world. The work aims to re-humanise those affected by the refugee crisis by using public space to share encounters that volunteers have had with migrants met in Calais. It is a way of bearing witness for the thousands of displaced people stuck in Calais and trying to reach the UK, whose voices are so often silenced or ignored. 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.

Conversations from Calais the book will showcase a selection of these conversations from over the years, that capture the intimate, sad, funny, angry, boring, familiar and unfamiliar moments between volunteers and migrants, in a way that will enlighten the reader and ultimately inspire real change, through contributing to public discourse a human understanding of this global and ever-present crisis.