life-in-paris.info

There are more than 177 miles of man-made tunnels and disused quarries under the streets of Paris. These cavernous spaces have become a focal point for urban culture and creativity, resulting in a private treasure-house of art, music and writing. For over 300 years anonymous and illicit visitors have sought to memorialize and comment on events above ground. Hidden in the darkness, and working in uncomfortable conditions, they have created paintings, drawings, graffiti, and sculpture on the walls on the walls of the tunnels as well as ephemeral paper works that are concealed in the stone.

Some visitors have been fugitives, many have simply sought a place to create undisturbed. Their subject matter is varied and often subversive, it ranges from current events and politics to the poetic and downright strange; but whatever the subject, the underground art records history with originality, creativity and style. New material is continually being added, it is rare anything is removed, and after 300 years a riot of imagery and objects have amassed, making a startling and unique environment.

Paris has huge subterranean cavities, built in 2000 years of history for many purposes like quarries, religious hideout, beer cellars, subways and bunkers. Most of the excavations are located at the base of the three “mountains” – Montparnasse, Montrouge and Montsouris. There are approximately 300km of galleries all together, not all of them are connected.

Cataphiles have been illicitly producing art in the underground since the early 1980s and their paintings are found over a large area of the quarry network. It is an atmosphere that has encouraged many artists to look inwards rather than outwards to produce meditative, contemplative and decidedly personal impressions of subjects that are always extraordinary and frequently bizarre – monsters and beasts, phantoms and ghouls are favorites; futuristic topics recur; and politics, religion and sex inevitably find wall space. The dimensions of the kata-art ranges from small mosaics that is no more than ten centimeters in diameter, to large ceramics of two meters high, or huge paintings that are in excess of twenty meters wide.

The Catacombs has many dates on the walls to indicate work done to consolidate the existing quarries, an enormous project to catalogue the location of the many unknown parts of the quarries and shore up their ceilings to allow Paris to grow. It was these efforts that were responsible for linking the entire tunnel system together.

The name catacombs are derived from the usage as graves. This name is sometimes used for all the underground caverns of Paris, but the tourist spot, open to the public, are the graves. They do not really promote them to tourists, but they are open to the public. At the end of the 18th century, the government began converting several subterranean rooms into mass graves. This was necessary to meet desperate overcrowding in the medieval cemeteries in the center of Paris, which also became a hygienic problem. From 1785 to 1786, in 15 months, millions of bones and rotting corpses were transported from the unsanitary city cemetery in Les Halles to this place. It was a colossal project to transport the bones in huge carts at night across the city.

And here they are, in huge piles, arranged as crosses, as faces and in other different configurations. Above the door outside are the words – in French – Stop! This is the empire of death.