During the Spring of 2023, Atelier JI worked with Migrate Art and Rachel Whiteread to create an edition of House to bring attention to the ongoing worldwide refugee crisis.
Whiteread created the artwork using coloured pencils salvaged from a school in the now demolished Calais Refugee camp.
Rachel Whiteread’s House(s) are no longer homes. Their emptiness is an ambiguity at the heart of which exists the memory of those who came before.
— Alycia Gaunt
In October 2016, The Calais ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in France, formerly housing approximately 10,000 refugees, was demolished by French Authorities. The Jungle, which had previously been full of life was transformed into a wasteland in the space of a few days.
Shortly after the camp’s destruction, Migrate Art re-visited the flattened site filled with debris from the demolished shelters, scattered across the whole site; where the bathrooms once stood, they found toothbrushes embedded in the soil and a number of coloured pencils and crayons were found in the dirt where a children’s school had previously been. These muddy pencils were brought back to London and sent out to leading contemporary artists, encouraging them to incorporate into original artworks in any way they wished, whether through drawing, sculpture or photography.
Rachel Whiteread created a work titled House for the charity, which was exhibited at Cork Street Galleries in Central London and sold as part of Phillips’ New Now sale on the 11 April, 2019. 90% of profits from the sale of these works was distributed equally between Migrate's charity partners: RefuAid, Refugee Community Kitchen, The Lotus Flower and The Worldwide Tribe, while 10% went into developing future Migrate Art projects.
