Les UX
underground organization
The UX (short for Urban eXperiment) is an underground organization of urban explorers who improve hidden corners of Paris. Their work includes undercover efforts to repair and restore the Panthéon's clock, building a cinema — complete with a bar and a restaurant — in a section of the Paris Catacombs 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.
History
With its start in September 1981, the founders of the group stole plans of the many underground passageways and tunnels for which Paris is famous. Using this information as a base, the group of anonymous artists and citizens has since restored much of Paris's underground infrastructure, including the Panthéon clock, which chimed for the first time in many years after its repair. The group is also responsible for over a dozen other projects, including those which the French government has not chosen to do or for which they lack funds.
Organization
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 (La Mexicaine De Perforation) organizing underground shows, a team doing photography, a team (Lyonnaise des Os) who explores the catacombs and create sculptures, and a team (Untergunther) undertaking restoration work with the help of architects and historians.
Projects
In October 2007, the Untergunther team received attention for a project to clandestinely restore the famous clock in the Panthéon which had been out of commission since the 1960s. They were assisted by professional clockmaker Jean-Baptiste Viot, installing a workshop for him beneath the building's dome. The team were not caught, and upon completion they announced their work to the building's administrator, after which the Centre des Monuments Nationaux sought unsuccessfully to prosecute them.
The public source identifies “Les UX” as underground organization. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around underground and organization.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q289689. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Les UX” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.