At this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, the Hungarian Pavilion focuses on a new museum building in Budapest, the Museum of Ethnography. The Museum was designed by Marcel Ferencz (Napur Architect) and completed in 2022 as one of Europe’s most notable cultural and urban development programs, the Liget Budapest Project. The exhibition in Venice, titled "Reziduum – The Frequency of Architecture" and curated by Mária Kondor-Szilágyi, will present the museum's collection through the digital medium. A short animated film titled Ethnozoom and an interactive computer program, the MotifCreator, will allow visitors to become familiar with Hungarian traditions and create their own motif compositions, thus contributing to worldwide community creation. The Hungarian Pavilion will showcase works by architect Marcel Ferencz, architect and composer Péter Mátrai, architect Judit Z. Halmágyi and light designer Ferenc Haász.
As the inspiration for the Venice exhibition, the Museum of Ethnography features two wings resembling an imagined circle with a circumference of 1 km. The building's surface extends into a rooftop garden that is more than 7,000 sqm in size. This circle is a passageway between the restored City Park's natural setting and the bustling city life. Many varied items are on display at the Museum. In one room, visitors can view the decorative lattice in an area of display with special laser lighting. Additionally, the Soundcylinder, a new contemporary instrument created by architect and composer Péter Mátrai, is the motif creating an audible connection between the structure and the musical experience.
The façade of the Museum of Ethnography is made up of nearly half a million pixels, displaying an interwoven tapestry of Hungarian culture. It includes contemporary transcriptions and ornamental patterns utilized in different time points by the varied traditions displayed and preserved in the museum. Moreover, the museum's façade aims to represent the country’s rich history over the past 150 years.
At this year’s Venice Biennale, visitors of the Hungarian Pavilion will be able to interact with a computer application, MotifCreator, and an animated short film, Ethnozoom. For the application, more than 1000 vectorized ornaments and motifs from the museum’s permanent collection of Hungarian and international artifacts are integrated into the user experience. Through this application, users can use a touch screen to create and download their originally themed compositions. In the movie display, a cultural memory with ethnological layers is explored, from historical artifacts to the composition of the new building and the surrounding urban landscapes. Both presentations aim to expand the global community’s creativity and the variety of cultural conversations. Additionally, the pavilion courtyard, a scale model will display the Ligest Budapest Project’s finished constructions and its future planned constructions.
Under this year’s theme, “The Laboratory of the Future,” curated by Lesley Lokko, many nations have decided to dive into their local history, landscape, and cultural experiences. The Taiwan Pavilion "Diachronic Apparatuses of Taiwan" explores how locals throughout Taiwanese history have used their intuition to shape their environment, opening a dialogue about artificial and natural terrain to rediscover what we may learn from nature. The Chilean Pavilion is presenting “Moving Ecologies”, addressing ecological repair and the important cultural and social issues attached to them. Finally, the Uruguay Pavilion presents “Future Scenarios of a Young Forestry Law”, unfolding the local forestry law as an ecosystemic infrastructure that is still under construction,
