Shocking Acts of Cultural Preservation and Repair

Les UX or Urban eXperiment is an underground organisation restoring or improving the city of Paris in secret, through repurposing hidden places, setting up pirate movie theatres and “shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair”. 

Evolving from a group of teenagers dedicated to urban exploration of the hidden features of Paris since the early eighties, one of the sensational feats of UX´s subgroup Untergunther, specifically dedicated to restoration was the clandestine restoration of  the Panthéon´s 19^th century clock. 

The Panthéon´s administration´s immediate reaction was to bring charges against the group.

"The New French Hacker-Artist Underground"- article by Jon Lackman in WIRED magazine. 

“Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.”

"Pantheon, User´s Guide". Screenshot from  a film by Lazar Kunstmann at Untergunther.