The UX (for Urban eXperiment) is an underground organization that improves hidden corners of Paris. Their works have included restoring the Panthéon clock, building a cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, underneath the Trocadéro, restoring medieval crypts, and staging plays and readings in monuments after dark. The group’s membership is largely secret, but its spokespeople include Lazar Kunstmann.
Beginning around 1982, the founders of the group stole plans of the many underground passage ways and tunnels for which Paris is famous. Using this information venues as a base, the group of anonymous artists and citizens have restored much of the underground infrastructure, including the restoration of the Pantheon clock which chimed for the first time in many years after their repair. The shadowy group of unknowns is also responsible for over a dozen other projects, including those which the French government has not chosen to do or lacks funds for.
The organization is divided into teams: an all-female team (the Mouse House) specializing in infiltration, a team running an internal messaging system and coded radio network, a team providing a database, a team organizing underground shows, a team doing photography, a team (Untergunther) doing restoration.
Untergunther’s membership includes architects and historians. The team has renovated a century-old abandoned government bunker and a 12th-century crypt. In October 2007, they received attention for a project, assisted by professional clockmaker Jean-Baptiste Viot, to clandestinely restore the famous clock in the Panthéon. Never caught, upon completion they announced their work at a meeting with the administrator of the Panthéon, who called the police. Charges were brought against the four Untergunther restorers of the Pantheon clock, but at trial, after twenty minutes deliberation, the judge ruled in their favor.
