Victory for Hungarian museum professionals in Paris debut

A victory was granted for the innovative solution, jointly created by the Budapest Ethnographic Museum and the Hungarian-founded Back and Rosta Ltd., which was recently presented at one of the world's most prestigious museum trade fairs, the Museum Connections in Paris. The Hungarian company's Magic Wall digital video wall made its debut as a sensation at the exhibition.

The 28th edition of the event, held on January 16-17, attracted thousands of visitors to France's second-largest exhibition center, the 36-hectare expo park at Port de Versailles. At least half of the over 300 exhibitors were foreign organizations, mostly representing small and large museum shops and vendors from Asia, North and South America, and of course, Europe. The event saw a large number of registrations from museum professionals, institution leaders, and service providers offering solutions, as Vanessa Leroy, the press spokesperson for Museum Connections, informed journalists on site.

The event traditionally recruits guests from the cultural and tourism sectors, reflecting on new trends and challenges within thematic frameworks each year. This time, they sought answers to the future visitor experience and the relationships between people and digitization. The main focus was on interaction with extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), the connection between the audience and cultural content, as well as the ecological impacts of heritage and cultural tourism.

Hungary was represented by two organizations: Back and Rosta Ltd., engaged in visitor experience development for over 10 years, and the Ethnographic Museum of Budapest. The two partners presented their joint project, realized within the museum walls in 2023, in the innovation section of the event, being the only foreign participants among French competitors. Dr. István Back, one of the founders and owners of Back and Rosta Ltd., and Dr. Péter Granasztói, deputy director of collections at the Ethnographic Museum, discussed their achievements with the interactive, educational knowledge transfer of the Magic Wall digital video walls.

Their spectacular presentation was dubbed the winner of the innovation section at the end of the event by Antoine Roland, one of the main organizers of the event and founder of the Correspondances Digitales agency. It is a great honor for us that at in our Parisian debut, we could represent our company's developments and Hungary so successfully with our excellent partner, the Ethnographic Museum, said Miklós Rosta, the other founder and owner of Back and Rosta Ltd., emphasizing that besides the success of the presentation, the fact that their organization and the Ethnographic Museum received significant attention can be a promising sign for their future.

Hungary's cultural and museum offerings, as well as its intellectual assets, have long been attractive to our foreign partners. In the past decade, we have organized numerous international exchange exhibitions, and with our self-developed video walls, the Magic Wall, we have assisted over 400 institutions worldwide in the digital presentation of their exhibitions, added Miklós Rosta.

For the Ethnographic Museum, collaborations that enable international innovations are extremely important. Through such collaborations, the Ethnographic Museum can make available to its visitors the objects preserved in its collection, along with the associated knowledge and research results, which become understandable and interesting for visitors of various generations, with different interests and backgrounds. The interactive digital exhibition showcasing the 150-year history of the Ethnographic Museum, based on the Magic Wall and appearing in the Meta Space, is one such large-scale project. As a result, not only has the period between 1871 and 2022 of the institution become comprehensible, but also the flow of international and Hungarian events reflected in the museum's timeline, said Dr. Lajos Kemecsi, the director of the Ethnographic Museum.