I know what you mean, PGB. There are some very tricky ethical questions that need thinking carefully about. This is one of the things I'm hoping to do as part of my role in our 'Architectures of Displacement' project https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/research/architectures-of-displacement

I went to a talk at the exhibition on Saturday where Mendel was in conversation with a young refugee support worker, an art historian and an anthropologist after he had given a tour of the exhibition. Mendel explained that he collected material as the bull-dozers were moving in. The people had already been displaced from the Jungle and what was left was discarded at the site before he took anything.

It was fascinating to hear how differently an artist talks about material culture e.g. I was interested to learn that he had purposefully chosen to collect items that were more ragged, burnt, broken and left the newest looking clothes because they didn't conjure, for him, what the people had been through. As archaeologists, we might be more interested in the fact that the material remains at the Jungle included lots of stuff that is expensive e.g. a Timberland jacket, Hunter wellies, all sorts of branded sportswear etc. As Dan Hicks remarked, in many ways, this is the archaeology of the wealthy because to reach Calais, people had to have parted with sometimes £20,000, paid to traffickers. Equally, the material culture exhibited at Mendel's show is stuff donated by well-meaning wealthy British and French people. There is also an important comment to be made on waste and wastefulness and the ways that these issues are illustrated via this site (a comment made by an audience member).

A further point made during the Q&A was that the stuff Mendel brought back to exhibit very often started off in the UK and is now allowed back in, while the people it was donated to are refused entry. Porous borders and materiality is something we'd like to look more at. Toothbrushes were seen by the artist as being particularly intimate because they contain the DNA of those displaced people. While the humanitarians said they were bogged down by toothbrushes, couldn't move for them, people used them once by the water stands and then discarded them.

There's a lot to think about. I would recommend going to see the stuff. It made me uncomfortable in places but it was sophisticated in places too. I'm not sure that we can hold all artists to the same high ethical standards that we like to set as archaeologists/anthropologists but we can talk about the differences and argue for what we think would be better ethical orientation.