“The Jungle” is a large residential area of 500,000m2 in the outskirts of Calais, France. Surrounded by a 5 meters-high metallic fence and equipped with running water and lights, the “New Jungle” offers different housing typologies, both old and newly built.

In Calais, more than 6,000 refugees used to live in the same conditions shown here. Now the camp has been demolished. Some of the refugees wanted to reach the UK, while others preferred to apply for asylum in France. Here we imagined how it would have been to find a home in the camp. Each house shown in here is real and handmade by the refugees themselves.

The idea of the real estate catalogue has been studied and chosen because it’s a way to analyse this issue through a language familiar to most people, but that usually is not attached to this kind of themes. Using precisely the stingy language of advertising and sale of these publications, we wanted to go beyond the clichés and show this theme under a more familiar point of view to us Europeans, without the fear of being disrespectful, but providing more information than you normally could get. And of course a good amount of irony With this, we hope to provide a new narrative form, different from the one proper academic writings – boring, complicated to understand and unknown to most – and the one proper to sensationalist mainstream media.

ImmoRefugee is based on a photographic project composed by 110 pictures showing the different typologies of houses. The work was meant to give a different perspective on the topic of migration, talking about a unique city that existed and it’s probably never going to be replicated.