Banksy’s new artwork criticises use of teargas in Calais refugee camp | Banksy

Speaking to the Guardian last week, a police spokesperson, Steve Barbet, denied that teargas was being used to clear the camps. “It’s not in our interest to use teargas unless it’s absolutely necessary to restore public order, and it is never used in the camp itself,” he said.

But the seven-minute clip posted on YouTube clearly shows teargas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades being used by the French authorities in an overnight raid in early January. Videos and reports of the repeated use of CS gas also emerged last Monday as French police attempted to create a 100-metre buffer zone between the camps and the motorway.

In January, a Banksy mural depicting the Apple founder Steve Jobs, whose biological father was a Syrian immigrant, appeared on the wall of a tunnel in the refugee camp in Calais. In a short statement accompanying the work, Banksy emphasised that Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, only existed because “they allowed in a young man from Homs”.

The Steve Jobs artwork was placed behind a protective glass plate by local authorities but last week vandals tore it down and defaced the graffiti. Earlier reports said one migrant had set up a tent beside the artwork and was charging five euros to view it.

Other politically-motivated artworks by Banksy that have appeared in Calais include a stencil by the beach, portraying a child looking towards Britain while a vulture sits atop their telescope.

Next to the town’s immigration office, Banksy also reproduced a version of ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, a painting of shipwreck survivors by 19th-century French painter Théodore Géricault. In Banksy’s re-imagining of the work, survivors on a raft desperately wave to catch the attention of an ostentatious modern yacht on the horizon.

As part of Dismaland, his temporary “bemusement” theme park in Weston-Super-Mare over the summer, Banksy built an installation that featured boats filled with the bodies of drowned refugees. On the closing night of Dismaland, Russian activist group Pussy Riot also debuted their specially-written song ‘Refugee’, which was a rallying cry for the leaders of Europe to step up their assistance to people fleeing war-torn countries.

Since Dismaland closed in September, the artist has been shipping its leftover infrastructure to help build emergency housing for the 7,000 migrants – who are mainly from Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan – now living on the site of a former rubbish tip in Calais.

According to the Dismaland website, the materials have already been used in 12 dwellings, a community area and a children’s play park.

In 2005, Banksy travelled to Israel’s West Bank barrier and decorated the Palestinian side of the concrete wall with nine satirical artworks. He also travelled to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and painted a dozen works on buildings left derelict after the disaster, including one that depicted Abraham Lincoln as a homeless man.