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Distinguished guests, dear artists, ladies and gentlemen,

It is an honour to be here with you tonight, in a house that bears the name of Robert Capa.

The curator of Metamorphosis, Emese Mucsi, has built this exhibition around a thought of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia: that all living beings share a single, continuous life, which keeps passing from one form into another. I can think of few better descriptions of culture. A society, too, lives one continuous life, and culture is its memory: the images, stories and customs through which people recognise each other as belonging to the same community.

Culture, in this sense, is the living tissue that holds a society together. I spent twenty-five years in museums before I came to the ministry, and if those years taught me one thing, it is this. A community whose culture is alive can withstand hard times; it argues, it remembers, it adapts, and through all of this it builds resilience.

That is why we made a promise to the Hungarian public: culture in this country will be free, and the state’s job is to provide the framework, the resources and the trust, and then to step aside.

That promise reaches beyond our borders. Hungary is finding its way back to Europe, and culture is a good place to start: ideas, images and people should move freely, and Hungarian artists should be seen in Turin, Rouen and Prague as naturally as their European colleagues are seen here tonight. The works on these walls travelled that road before they reached us. The institutions in this room, from the FUTURES platform to the International Cultural Centre in Kraków and Europa Nostra, are the ones that keep the road open, and we are glad to be walking it with you again.

Metamorphosis moves between three scales: the molecule, the family and the landscape. As an ethnographer I spent many years among the objects that families keep, and photographs were always among them. We keep them because they bear witness to our lives. At a time when images can be produced by algorithms, that testimony becomes more precious every year, and the people who make and curate photographs are its guardians.

I want to thank them. The Capa Center has been a member of the FUTURES platform since 2017, and in those nine years it has opened the doors of a European professional community to forty-five Hungarian photographers. This is patient and often unseen work, done by curators, educators and colleagues whose names rarely appear on a gallery wall. Thank you for your excellent work.

Metamorphosis is change from within: a being remains itself and becomes more than it was. That is the change I wish for Hungarian culture, and for all of us gathered here this evening. May this exhibition be one of the forms through which our shared life passes, and may it leave us more closely bound to one another than it found us.

Thank you.

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