les UX
The UX (for Urban eXperiment) is an underground organization that improves hidden corners of Paris. Their works have included restoring the Pantheon clock,[1] 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.
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[edit] History
Beginning around 1982, the group took plans of the underground Paris. [2] The group has restored 12 projects including the Pantheon clock.
[edit] 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 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.
One project, La Mexicaine de Perforation (LMDP), built an underground cinema, Les Arènes de Chaillot, next to the Cinémathèque Française. La Mexicaine De Perforation (The Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority) is a subdivision of a French group called the UX (for Urban eXperiment). They provide clandestine artistic events.[3]
[edit] Official reaction
The Parisian authorities oppose the group's actions, starting a police unit to track them through the sewers and catacombs of Paris, and attempting to apprehend and charge them.
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.
[edit] References
- ^ "Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock", The Guardian, 26 Nov 2007
- ^ Lackman, Jon (January 20, 2012). "The New French Hacker-Artist Underground". Wired. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/01/ff_ux/all/1. Retrieved January 25, 2012.
- ^ Henley, Jon (September 11, 2004). "Paris's new slant on underground movies: Clandestine group reveals how it built its cinema beneath the city". The Guardian (Manchester: Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/11/film.france. Retrieved April 24, 2011. "There are, at most, 15 of them. Their ages range from 19 to 42, their professions from nurse to window dresser, mason to film director. And in a cave beneath the streets of Paris, they built a subterranean cinema whose discovery this week sent the city's police into a frenzy... Until recently very few people did have a clue about La Mexicaine de la Perforation, a clandestine cell of "urban explorers" which claims its mission is to "reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art"."
[edit] Sources
- "La culture en clandestins. L'UX, the book by Lazar Kunstmann, the spokesman for the UX"
- "Underground ‘terrorists’ with a mission to save city’s neglected heritage", The Times, 29 Sep 2007
