THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

The shipping lane between Calais and the cliffs of Dover is the busiest in the world. This stretch of water is also the favoured route used by illegal immigrants in their attempt to reach the United Kingdom from Calais. The west-east axis of global trade is perpendicular to the south-north axis of migration triggered by war and poverty. The port facilities, with their surveillance and security equipment, fencing, and barriers form a huge complex of utilitarian structures, custom-built areas, restrictive and sometimes brutal mechanisms. The sea birds fly above and contemplate.

Two women suddenly appear on the cliffs, in the Kent countryside, as if they have landed or been teleported. Are they two angels who have come down from heaven to earth to check out this part of the planet, extraterrestrial visitors, or indeed a feminine duo from a slapstick film? Then our two characters arrive in the port of Dover where they enter on foot, in among the lorries and cars. They explore this huge stretch of tar bristling with fencing and security barriers. Then, with the cars and articulated lorries, they descend into the dark bowels of a ferry. They walk around and observe. They check out the man-made objects – lamp posts, traffic signs, all sorts of signposts, barriers, gratings and traffic-flow plotters. In fact they don’t really seem to differentiate; they fail to take on board the functionality of things, and by extension their implicit restrictiveness and aggressiveness. They try to understand them by gauging them in terms of their own bodies. Along this choreographic journey, comic or absurd in turns, they try to take stock, to report on this part of the world where the focus on dehumanization and control increases and where the element of violence becomes more visible.
In the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the Channel where France and Great Britain appear almost to touch, it is as if the mirror that is the sea rises up vertically, duplicating the coast, the ports and the cliffs in its reflection.