The spaces documented here in Germany’s Ruhr area by Johannes Naumann, Gregor Sailer and Stefan Tuschy are normally not freely accessible. It is the hermetically sealed world of archives, underground bunkers, storage facilities and tunnel systems which, as hidden lifelines, keep the pulse of our modern lives alive. With the camera’s inquisitive gaze and a compositional intent they explore this hidden world and uncover a certain functional aesthetic: monolithic shapes, endless corridors lined with shelves, the perspective of vanishing points, and the highly specific colour palette of items of everyday use. These literally underground locations are usually omitted in the presentation of architecture. In their coolly neutral images Naumann / Sailer / Tuschy cast light on these suppressed—as it were—sites of storage, protection and technology.