Inaccessible and mysterious, all things underground have always fascinated humans, long becoming a source of inspiration for artists who, over the centuries and indeed the millennia, have sought to imagine what incredible life forms may live there or, to the contrary, have used it as a provocative antithesis of the “world on the surface”. Two images from the Greek world in particular have periodically resurfaced over time: that of hell as an underground world, where Charon ferries the souls of the dead in his boat across the Styx and where Dante places some of the personalities of his time, administering exemplary punishments, or Plato’s cave, the allegory of the human condition suspended between the desire for knowledge and the risk of not being able to distinguish true from false.
In more modern times, the underground has also been represented through fantasy: the hard graft of miners was portrayed by Vincent Van Gogh, Renato Guttuso and many other artists; commuters crammed into subway carriages were immortalised in the shots of photographers like Louis Stettner, for whom the New York subway is an arena where the unending human comedy of anticipation and exhaustion is staged.
The underground worlds interpreted or imagined by painters, sculptors and directors were the subject of an investigation carried out last year by the Louvre in Lens, a museum that stands in a former mining area, where the memory of the disembowelment of the earth can still be felt. Climbing the hill to the elegant glass and metal box, designed by the Japanese firm Sanaa, and looking towards the horizon, you can still see one of the many terrils, mounds of mining debris that make rolling hills of this otherwise flat territory, and observe the clean geometries of the neighbourhoods of corons, the characteristic red-brick miners’ houses celebrated in the local football team’s anthem.
“The museum project is closely bound to the local area, so it seemed natural to us to investigate this topic, so rich in references to local history and art history,” explains Gautier Verbeke, curator of the exhibition Mondes souterrains. 20.000 lieux sous la terre (Underground worlds. 20,000 leagues below the earth) which between the spring and summer of 2024 gathered together over 200 art works – paintings, sculptures, installations, films, books, documents and architecture models. The story narrated in the museum spaces pushes into the present, with contemporary explorations showing how scientific progress is far from quenching the interest of artists in what is hidden beneath our feet.
“Even though our knowledge of the underground world has made huge progress in the last century, the physical inaccessibility of everything that happens underground continues to fuel the imagination,” Verbeke continues. “Contemporary artists tackle this subject in many different ways: for example, they think about urban spaces such as the underground and the way in which these reflect the oddities of our society, or they investigate the persistent mystery of cave paintings, prehistoric man’s first creative gestures. The theme of the tunnel or cave can also represent a metaphor of introspection, or on the contrary the approach to the other.”
