Paris, France
Mission Title: Underground Paris - With Gilles Thomas
Mission By: Abigail Turner, Claudia Retegan
Mission Finished on Date: 21-05-2008
SCRIPT
- Explore Paris’s dreams and nightmares, forgotten memories and new problems hiding in the catacombs.
- Go underground with Gilles Thomas, expert on the subterranean passageways beneath Paris, and ask him questions about both its history and how its currently being used.
- Bring a strong light for your camera, so that you’ll have good visibility for the camera beneath the surface.
- Be sure to compare, on film, the darkness with the tunnel with the light aboveground.
TRAVEL BAG
How do in-between, hidden, and subterranean spaces affect the life of the city?
Just twenty meters under Paris, beneath its museums packed with tourists and streets rattling with traffic, beneath its romantic imaginary and its famous prickly attitude, exists another Paris, a darker one, a place packed with German bunkers, bone piles from Montparnasse, punk crash pads, catacomb art, defunct phone cables, a scrabble game abandoned by gnomes, beer can lanterns, and inscriptions dating back to the French revolution. More George Simenon than Victor Hugo, but not without a little subcultural thrill or the stain of corporate malfeasance.
Many of the passageways through the Parisian heart were cut by a mining company, that only realized too late, that their shafts were causing the surface to collapse. Most of the mining tunnels consist of supports at regular intervals which serve to keep whole city blocks from collapsing. The shadowy side to the City of Lights like the human subconscious keeps the whole of it, literally, from crashing.
This subterranean world is off most maps, a place where things hidden, forgotten, abandoned and forbidden sink out of sight, but like the rest of the city, this space is shifting and changing in new ways all the time. Such spaces are difficult to find and even harder to navigate. But if there's anybody who can guide you while traveling under the surface of Paris, it's the man who wrote the book on the life of Paris underground,Gilles Thomas.
Mission Report
Before descending into the ground a sign warns: “ Stop! Here begins the empire of death”. Walking through the stone quarries placed under Cochin Hospital we get the feeling that the underground passages resemble the streets above ground - the walls are in fact marked with signs pointing to the streets above.
The feeling you get by walking 20 meters below the ground is that of being in a maze. The absolute silence, the absence of natural light and being surrounded by stone can only be striking, but the most striking thing for us are the random jottings on the walls dating back to the 17th century, that take on the air of an intimate diary, telling of the city of Paris and its people.
Although all underground quarries are collectively referred to as “The Catacombs”, we soon realise that the catacombs themselves constitute only a small part of the network: you don’t have just a mass of anonymous graveyards, even though the countless other uses appear to have been forgotten - just to name a few: wartime shelter, water supply, limestone quarry, Capuchin monks refuge, conspirators hide out and, last but not least, mushroom farms.
The quarries used to be completely connected, but now most of the tunnels are off limits to the public and illegal access points are guarded by the ICG (General Inspection of Quarries). It definitely shouldn’t be left up to the authorities to deny citizens access to their culture, history and heritage. Ironically, the ICG seems to be unintentionally reigniting public curiosity by contributing to the mystique and danger surrounding the quarries.
Abigail Turner, Claudia Retegan
