Post-Excavation Manger, Louise Fowler, has been working on an assessment for the Dzhangal Archaeology Project with MOLA colleagues and Sarah Mallet, a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow based at the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and researcher for Pitt Rivers Museum's LANDE exhibition. Together they have been recording a group of objects collected by the photographer Gideon Mendel at the site of the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp, many of which were displayed in 2017 as part of his exhibition Dzhangal at the Autograph ABP gallery in London. In this blog she shares some of her personal observations, thoughts and hopes for the project.
I open a plastic Ziploc bag and reach in carefully to take out a tiny smiling toy head almost entirely engulfed by long, unruly locks of chestnut hair. I have seen her before. In Gideon’s dramatically staged photograph she looks like the head of Medusa, with coils of snake-like hair.
Her detached head makes me think of other kinds of detachments – the kind you might feel if you were far from the place where you were raised, or the place that you thought of as home.
She also makes me think of the children who were living in the place where she was found. The streaks of dirt on her face make me think of the daily difficulties of life in such a place.
