Mexican Perforation

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The Mexicaine de Perforation is a French artistic movement by the group les UX that seeks to express their ideas by larcenic (illegal) occupation of underground places. A loose english translation for the name of the group could be "Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority".

In September 2004, French police were involved in a training exercise in the Paris Catacombs, having entered through a drain near the Trocadéro, when they discovered a hidden chamber. The chamber, essentially an amphitheatre which had been hewn from the surrounding rock, had been used as an underground movie theatre run by the Perforating Mexicans. The chamber contained a movie screen, and an adjacent chamber contained a well stocked bar, and a kitchen equipped for couscous. Telephones and electricity were piped in from the surface. Movie titles ranging from 1950s classics to modern thrillers were also discovered. When the police returned for a formal investigation, all the equipment had disappeared— all that was left was a note on the floor reading, "Do not try to find us."

The artist/activist group Ana Tolyan Plane Network cited the Mexicaine de Perforation in a billboard intervention that took place in Istanbul on April 25, 2005. According to the network, it was "no accident that this appeared on the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide." The intervention by Ana Tolyan Plane called attention to the "certain discomfort within Turkish society (which) is beginning to surface as a response to the longtime denial of historical transgressions."