British street artist Banksy has left his mark on the town of Calais, where seven thousand refugees have made camp as they wait to enter the United Kingdom.
“We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources,” Banksy said in a public statement, “but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7 billion a year in taxes—and it only exists because [the United States] allowed in a young man from Homs.”
Bansky has been sending unused materials from his Dismaland “bemusement park” installation to help build shelter for the migrants living in “the Jungle” of Calais.
Banksy even incorporated French romantic Théodore Géricault’s famous painting “The Raft Of The Medusa” into one mural in the Calais town center, with the survivors of the doomed Méduse reaching out to an luxury ocean liner in the distance. A modified version of the Géricault work was used as the artwork to the Pogues’ album Rum, Sodomy, And The Lash.
Conditions at the Jungle, where winter is fast approaching, have reached the point where PETA has started donated real fur coats to the migrants, saying that they’re the “only people with any excuse to wear fur.”
