Living underground

This issue of Communications devoted to those human and non-human beings who live underground uses Lewis Carroll’s Alice as its guide, starting from the inaugural moment when, in her pursuit of the White Rabbit, she innocently leaps into a large burrow. Even if the tunnel ultimately happens to be an entry point into a dream, it nevertheless leads Alice to experiment with playing with language and body alike, over a series of successive encounters with the underground “mirabilia,” oddly “alive” in this hostile place.

Following Alice’s experimentations, the authors in this issue get their bearings in these unseen places through descriptions of ways of living, of doing, of getting a sense of the underground, for the miner, the diver, the fighter, or those who find shelter in the subsoil of the metropolis. They show how one penetrates, works in, dwells down there. They also elaborate on how certain skills and knowledge take root there, and how technical gestures and livable spaces are invented in the interstices of the ground. How, inside this very peculiar matter seething with living organisms, subtle bondings emerge, relationships are forged, which must be charted, in the frame of the redeployed boundaries separating the inert and the living.