This piece is among those Banksy left in late 2015 at the refugee camp in Calais, France, widely known as “the Jungle”.

The composition is quite simple: a child looks at the horizon through a telescope. The direction the child is looking in is not random. Calais sits on the French coast at the narrowest point of the English Channel; on a clear day, the opposite shore, England, can be seen with the naked eye. According to reports, the child has the telescope pointed exactly in that direction, towards Britain.

This single detail carries the whole meaning of the piece. For the people living in the camp, England was not kilometres away in any ordinary sense. It was close enough to see, yet impossible to reach. The telescope becomes the tool of this paradox: it brings something closer without making it reachable. Placing a child behind that instrument means depicting waiting, hope and helplessness all at once.

The second element in the composition changes the whole tone of the scene: perched on top of the telescope is a vulture. In nature, a vulture is a bird that waits for death, sitting patiently over a carcass. Placing this figure directly above a child looking hopefully towards the horizon reverses the direction of the gaze. While the child watches the opposite shore, someone else is watching the child, and what that someone is waiting for is not rescue.

This double structure lifts the piece out of being a simple scene of longing and turns it into a direct statement about the risk of death. The number of people who lost their lives trying to cross the Channel kept rising both when this piece was made and afterwards. Banksy gives no statistics here, he simply draws a bird.

This piece belongs to a wider series Banksy left in Calais. Around the same time, the artist also made The Son of a Migrant from Syria, The Raft of the Medusa, and We’re Not All in the Same Boat.

These pieces shared a common fate, tied to that of the camp itself. The Steve Jobs piece was destroyed in January 2016 despite protective measures. French authorities gradually cleared the camp through 2016, and a large scale demolition took place in October 2016. Some of the pieces are reported to have been preserved, while others were lost along with the demolition.

Girl With Telescope is the quietest of Banksy’s Calais pieces. There is no slogan here and no famous face, only a child, and a shore too close to see and yet impossible to reach.