Banksy Les Miserables artwork as Graffiti art outside the French Embassy in London.
The elusive street artist Banksy has gone digital with his murals with his interactive les Misérables mural that was just added to Google’s digital archive right before it was removed from a wall outside of the French embassy in London. The world famed British artist latest piece was created to highlight the refugee situation in Calais and their brutal treatment and featured the iconic image of a little girl from the musical Les Miserables.
And in true Banksy fashion, he altered the piece to make his statement – adding tears that streamed down her gentle face and engulfed her in a cloud of gas that rose up from a canister on the floor nearby. He also included a scannable Q code on his mural, a first for him – that took views to an actual video of police raiding the Calais Jungle refuge camp back on January 5, 2016. When Google’s Cultural Institute Project got wind that the piece of wall art was going to be moved, they decided to go and archive it on StreetView and the Cultural Institute’s Banksy site. To archive the piece, the StreetView team at Google appeared with their 360 Trekker camera to take images of the piece. They plan on creating high-res scans of it, too.
Banksy created the piece the same week in January that French police allegedly stepped up their use of tear gas in the Calais Jungle refugee camp, writes the Telegraph’s piece on the event. The mural is actually a part of an ongoing series from Banksy that focuses on the refugee camp. Before, he created a mural of Apple’s former CEO, the late Steve Jobs, as he carried a computer and all of his belongings to cause awareness that Jobs was born to Syrian migrants. This piece was located at the entrance to the Calais Jungle, but it’s now been defaced. Banksy les miserables canvas prints can be ordered though our website from as little as £4.99