Banksy highlights the refugee crisis through Steve Jobs street art in Calais

Banksy created a series of works in and around Calais addressing the European refugee crisis, including a striking portrait of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs inside the migrant camp known as the Jungle.

The works appeared shortly after Banksy’s Dismaland project in Weston-super-Mare. When the temporary exhibition closed, building materials from the site were transported to Calais as part of an initiative dubbed Dismal aid, where they were reused to help construct shelters, a community space and a children’s play area.

Banksy’s Steve Jobs Mural in Calais

The most widely recognised of Banksy’s Calais works depicted Steve Jobs carrying an early Macintosh computer and a bag of belongings over his shoulder, presenting one of the world’s most famous technology entrepreneurs in the visual language of displacement. The choice of Jobs was deliberate. His biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian immigrant from Homs. Through the portrait, Banksy challenged the idea that migration should be understood simply as a burden on a country’s resources.

Banksy said:

“We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources, but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7bn a year in taxes – and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.”

Further along the wall appeared the words: “Nobody deserves to live this way.”

Together, the image and text shifted the discussion away from statistics and borders towards individual lives, opportunity and human potential.

“Maybe This Whole Situation Will Just Sort Itself Out”

Another intervention in the camp used Banksy’s familiar combination of understatement and irony. Painted simply onto a wall were the words: “Maybe this whole situation will just sort itself out.”

The deliberately passive statement operated as a criticism of political inaction. Rather than depicting the crisis directly, Banksy turned indifference itself into the subject of the work.

Banksy’s Raft of the Medusa in Calais

In Calais town centre, Banksy created another work showing refugees crowded aboard a small vessel attempting to attract the attention of a luxury yacht in the distance. Banksy accompanied the image with the phrase: “We’re not all in the same boat.”

The composition referenced Théodore Géricault’s monumental 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa, one of the defining works of French Romanticism.

Géricault’s painting depicts survivors of a shipwreck desperately signalling towards a vessel on the horizon. Banksy transported that historical image of abandonment into the contemporary refugee crisis.

The contrast between the overcrowded raft and the luxury yacht makes the message particularly sharp. The work is not simply about people travelling by sea; it is about radically different experiences of vulnerability, security and privilege existing within the same world.

The Girl, the Telescope and the Vulture

Another stencil showed a young girl looking through a telescope towards the horizon while a vulture perched above her. It is one of the quieter works in the Calais series.

The child looks outward, suggesting expectation, distance and the possibility of another life beyond the immediate landscape. Above her, however, the vulture introduces an unmistakable sense of danger and uncertainty.

Where the Steve Jobs portrait confronts arguments surrounding migration directly, this work operates through atmosphere and symbolism.

Banksy and the Calais Refugee Crisis

Taken together, Banksy’s Calais interventions approached the refugee crisis from several directions. The Steve Jobs portrait challenged assumptions about the economic and cultural contribution of migrants.

The Raft of the Medusa-inspired work connected contemporary migration with one of European art history’s most powerful images of abandonment and survival.

The phrase “Maybe this whole situation will just sort itself out” addressed political inertia.

And the girl with the telescope reduced the crisis to something more intimate: an individual looking towards an uncertain future.

Banksy has repeatedly used public space to place political questions directly into everyday environments. In Calais, those interventions were particularly immediate. They appeared not inside a gallery but within and around a place where displacement, borders and migration were being experienced in real time.

Thank you Banksy for another powerful set of murals to highlight and bring attention to the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. You can also make a difference today by donating directly to the Syria Relief.