A multisensory exhibition showing pre-war Warsaw can be visited at Warsaw’s Norblin Factory. In the Art Box Experience using a system of dozens of state-of-the-art projectors and integrated moving screens. The pre-war capital city comes to life in nine rooms over an area of 800 square metres.

“Retro Warsaw is a thrilling journey through time and space. Like a time machine, it takes us back to the pre-war capital for several dozen minutes, immersing viewers in digitally animated images, vivid colours, music and the sounds of everyday life. It features Warsaw characters: newspapermen and maydaners (market vendors), Jewish merchants and Hasidic Jews, policemen and apaszes (criminals), elegant ladies and chic bachelors,” say the organisers.

Thanks to an integrated system of screens offering the highest quality of image, visitors can see the everyday life of the inhabitants at a time when carriages travelled on Warsaw’s streets, biplanes flew in the sky and the songs of Hanka Ordonówna and Mieczysław Fogg echoed through the city.

The exhibition is based on photographs and archive films from Polish and foreign collections, which have been digitised, cleaned, coloured and partially animated through computer animation and film post-production. The soundtrack was designed and recorded by Jan Emil Młynarski. It features the sounds of the city, the dialect of Warsaw, Yiddish conversations and Warsaw melodies.

“Exhibitions of this kind are now growing in popularity around the world. The precursor in Europe is the Atelier des Lumières in Paris. They focus on art. We started with an exhibition that combines the characteristics of a historical exhibition and an unparalleled visual experience. We present it in a very modern, unprecedented way, which is very well received by both the public and experts, museum professionals”, says Mateusz Labuda, co-founder and vice-president of the board of Art Box Experience.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński