collections | Daniel Antal

Fortepan & Főfotó

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fortepan is not only an open, privately run photography archive, but has effectively become a Hungarian national institution. Originally built from rescued negatives found during informal “spring-cleaning” discoveries, it has grown into a subjectively curated yet widely used visual memory of Hungary before 1989. Still operated by a civil society organisation, Fortepan today collaborates with major institutions, contributes to exhibitions and publications, and increasingly serves as a repository for private and institutional photographic collections.

Browse personal donations

I have been involved with Fortepan as a user, volunteer, and donor for many years. My most significant contribution was the localisation and recovery of the long-lost negative archive of Főfotó, a centralised photographic enterprise created after the nationalisation of private studios in socialist Hungary. This organisation documented architecture, industry, public life, and everyday scenes, but its archive disappeared during the transition of the 1990s.

Browse the published, curated photographs from this recovered collection.

Through collecting and analysing historical negatives acquired on the art market, I identified traces of this lost archive and, together with Fortepan, initiated a process that led to its partial reconstruction. At this point, no institutional buyer had the resources or the legal capacity to buy this risky find, so I stepped into as a buyer. We transferred 400,000 negatives (for comparison: more than the permanent collection of the Dutch Photography Museum) in a van to Budapest from a tiny, almost derelict village.

The 35mm rolls from the 1980s occupied the least space.

After clarifying legal and provenance issues, which took quiet some time, the 400,000 that came in large banana boxes and their original drawer structure ( the most important physical organisational system that we wanted to preserve intact) this collection lived with me, filling much of my bedroom.

After a long process, the with surviving inventory records—were recovered, digitised in part by Fortepan, and ultimately deposited in the Budapest City Archives. This process required not only historical and technical expertise, but also careful negotiation around ownership, provenance, and public accessibility.

For me, this project represents a concrete example of how photographic heritage can be reconstructed outside institutional frameworks and later reintegrated into them. It reflects a long-standing interest in the lifecycle of collections—how they are created, lost, rediscovered, and reinterpreted—and in the role that individuals and civic initiatives can play in preserving cultural memory.

Browse the published, curated photographs from this recovered collection.

Mari Clothing Heritage Across Collections

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:45:00 +0100

Read our Substack blogpost

Rather than building a new platform or launching a large institutional programme, we focused on a carefully designed, hands-on intervention. The goal was to create a concrete, working example that could be expanded, criticised, reused, and—crucially—taken up by others. Continue reading on Substack…

WikiMuseum

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wikimuseum is an experimental curatorial concept developed with Wikimedia Eesti and Wikimedia Hungary, creating multilingual, co-curated exhibitions across Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia. It brings together dispersed cultural heritage—often never seen together physically—into structured digital exhibitions that connect institutional collections, private archives, and community knowledge.

The project explores how open platforms can support collaboration between museums, researchers, and source communities, while addressing legal, ethical, and data governance challenges.

Key exhibitions & outcomes

Livonian Traditional Dress (TextileBase integration) A cross-border exhibition connecting collections from Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, forming the first comprehensive, structured visual and data-driven presentation of the dress heritage of Liv (Livonian) people. Its research data is powered by the TextileBase project. Visit the exhibition in the Wikimuseum at https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipeedia:GLAM/Traditional_Livonian_Clothing/en/1

Mari Traditional Clothing (ERM-led multilingual exhibition) Built primarily on ERM collections and complemented by Finnish and Wikimedia Commons materials, this exhibition provides accessible interpretation in Estonian, Hungarian, English, Russian, and Meadow Mari, reconnecting dispersed heritage with both international audiences and Mari communities. Visit the exhibition on Wikimedia Eesti’s GLAM page:

Visit the exhibition

Udmurt Ethnographic Photography (ongoing, community-informed curation) A collaborative project with Wikimedia Hungary and Udmurt contributors focusing on improving provenance, correcting historical descriptions, and identifying dispersed or censored photographic materials across collections.

Visit the growing collection

Key insights / lessons

Open platforms can function as curated museum environments, not only repositories, when structured with clear metadata and narrative layers
Multilingual annotation and community participation enable reconstruction of missing knowledge, especially for underrepresented or historically misrepresented groups
Digital co-curation creates new forms of collaboration between institutions, civic initiatives, and source communities, but requires careful handling of legal, ethical, and governance questions

TextileBase

Sun, 11 May 2025 15:05:10 +0100

TextileBase is a platform to collect, connect, and share knowledge about historical clothing.
It links artefacts, photographs, secondary sources, and institutional records into a multilingual, interoperable, and searchable knowledge graph.

By bringing together scattered records from museums, archives, researchers, and businesses, TextileBase enables richer stories about how people dressed, lived, and expressed themselves.

Why Textiles?

Unlike stone or metal, textiles are fragile. Few garments survive beyond a century. What we know often comes from dispersed museum pieces, old photographs, or drawings — often in different languages and formats.

TextileBase connects these fragments into one network: a living map of dress history.

Who is TextileBase for?

Museums & archives — link dispersed collections into larger platforms such as Europeana and ECCCH.
Researchers & cultural heritage projects — manage data to FAIR/8-star standards, publish reusable datasets, data papers, and visualisations.
Businesses — from sustainable fashion to cultural tourism, TextileBase supports digital product passports, provenance tracking, and heritage storytelling.

Connect artefacts, images, and texts into one collaborative, AI-supported research space.

👉 Build on shared knowledge: Technical details & offering

TextileBase is not only about preserving the past — it’s about making data usable now, for research, heritage, and innovation.

Examples from the Database

Connecting dispersed artefacts: 19th-century Latgalian garments in one linked dataset (Q142, Q180, Q179, Q181).

Connecting Artefacts Across Borders

Understanding Secondary Sources

Enriching records with secondary sources: trousers identified from a 1913 Seto photograph (Q331).

Following Shifting Place Names

Tracing shifting place names: a Livonian skirt recorded under Finnish, German, Livonian, and Latvian toponyms (Q347).

Building a Wikimuseum for Dispersed Collections

Inspired by Wikimedia Estonia’s multi-language, open-access model, we propose a virtual museum—a Wikimuseum—that brings together:

Artefacts from rural museums (e.g., Mõniste, Saatse, Värska)
Items in national museums (Estonia, Finland, Hungary)
Private collections that would never be physically exhibited together

Building a Wikimuseum: connecting dispersed collections across languages, borders, and institutions. See early prototype: Seto Traditional Clothing.

👉🏿 Preview Presentation The Concept of a WikiMuseum: WikiMuseum = GLAM Wiki + Wikibase + Data Sharing Space press F for full-screen view (to be presented at WikimediaCEE 2025 in Thessaloniki.)

Next Steps

👉🏻 Visit the TextileBase website

👉🏾 Subscribe (PDF)

👉🏼 Get in touch

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:40:00 +0100

The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space is a research-driven data sharing space for reconnecting fragmented cultural heritage across languages, institutions, and countries. Developed with minimal resources as a curatorial and technical experiment, it combines semantic web technologies with participatory methods to make underrepresented Finno-Ugric cultures visible and reusable in contemporary digital infrastructures.

Rather than building a new repository, the project demonstrates how multilingual metadata, community-driven annotation, and lightweight governance models can enable cultural reconstruction and long-term interoperability in low-scale heritage ecosystems.