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My name is Veerle de Meester. I am one of the registrators of the Royal Musum for the fine arts in Antwerp.
Last year I spent a lot of time on the preparations for the move to the new internal arts depot.
The museum no longer complies with the climate control norms for the storage and preservation of artwork.
Ofcourse the new depot does have the required climatological properties:
A humidity of around 52 percent and a temperature of 19 degrees celcius.
The past eight weeks we have been busy moving the paintings that are not going to travel
and are not going to be restored and are unavailable for research to the new depot.
That is more than 1200 paintings, but we do need to know the location of every painting at any given time.
The works we will be taking down today are large, heavy, fragile works.
Some of the paintings are very large and have been painted on wood.
These are panels.
These are the works that cannot be moved to other rooms and cannnot be moved out of the museum.
The only way these works can be moved to the depot is through a hatch in the Rubensroom.
The hatch provides an entrance to the bunkerdepot at the bottom.
It is not the first time that these hatches have been used to move paintings to safety.
We have videos that show that, to prepare for the Second World War, these same paitings were taken down through these hatches.
Downstairs we have some carts waiting that have been especially designed to carry these paintings.
Soon we will be done moving.
It has been an especially interesting project that has taught us much.
It is a shame that I have to miss all these things for such a long time but they have a good, safe place to rest in the years to come.