We were huddled in front of the thin light of a fire in an abandoned house on a cold January night in Calais X was making another cup of very sugary tea Y stirring the kindling yelled as he accidentally grabbed a burning twig are you trying to clean your fingerprints laughed X A Rough History is a performance lecture installation and 16mm film following several visits to Calais that considers a practice by migrants entering the EU of destroying their fingerprints to avoid detection by the Eurodac system alongside other histories of fingerprinting and fingerprint erasures It sees the fingerprint as a scaled down landscape looking at the circulation of the image of the fingerprint and the different lives and journeys of the migrants whose hands produce such images
