Trafo, one of the most important cultural venues of the Hungarian capital, was the first institution to transform and unused industrial building into an art space in Budapest. The electric transformer building situated in the edge of the city’s historical core, built in the style of the industrial art nouveau in 1909, had been abandoned for more than forty years when the French anarchist group Resonance discovered it in the early 1990s and transformed it into squat, hosting a variety of cultural events, performances, concerts, presentations.

After the squat was shut down, it served for years as a storage a storage space for theatre and theatre and music groups. In the middle of the 1990s, using the money it didn’t spend on the 1994 World Exhibition, the Municipality of Budapest bought the building to transform it into a well-equipped contemporary art centre. The Trafo – House of Arts opened doors in 1998 and had quickly become an important Central European centre for contemporary theatre, dance, and music.