A view from the palace basement: overhead, a worn, white-painted board with patches of fallen plaster, and beneath it, an old brick wall exposed in places. Through the opening, a corridor with a vaulted brick ceiling stretches on into the dark. Construction materials lie scattered about — chipboard panels, sheets of glass, a support frame, and an empty spray bottle on an improvised partition wall on the right, clad in mustard-coloured board.
Unlike the palace façades seen in the previous exhibits in this series, the basement reveals the condition not of the decoration, but of the structure itself: beneath the now-flaking painted finish lies plain, solid late-19th-century brickwork — a vaulted corridor, built in that shape precisely to bear the weight of the floors above. The newer, temporary partitions nearby are a reminder that before reaching this, the building's oldest layer, some attempt had already been made to adapt the space for other use.
The camera moves slowly forward, deeper into the corridor — with no colouring, since this is already a real, coloured frame, simply letting you take a few steps yourself beneath the vaults that hold up the palace.