In Barcelona, design is breathed, that made with care, honesty, and talent, capable of leaving a mark and defining part of its character. The essence of the city today perpetuates the industrial legacy that emerged during the 19th century and led to the appearance of design in various sectors such as textiles, ceramics, furniture, and publishing. This valuable and heterogeneous capital in design, understood not only as a material object but also as an attitude, is more relevant than ever today with the creative activity carried out in the city and which finds a clear exponent in the Barcelona Design Week (BDW).
The 16th edition of this major event for design, creativity, and innovation in the Catalan capital, BDW 2021 City Festival, takes place from October 7 to 30, with more than 80 activities spread throughout the city where citizens can enjoy all its creative potential. With an informative spirit and aimed at the general and family public, the October call – after the BDW Pro 2021 held in June and aimed at professionals – arrives with a wide range of in-person proposals that can be enjoyed both in the urban environment itself and in establishments, galleries, studios, and showrooms.
Avenida Diagonal, one of the most important and unique arteries of the city, will become, from October 14 to 30, the protagonist of the installation Design Cubes on Diagonal where, through eight cubes located at different points along the nearly twelve kilometers of the road, the role that design plays in our daily lives will be explained. And it will be done from different areas, such as craftsmanship, digitalization, well-being, the future, public space, the planet, lighting, and food design.
Eight cubes located at different points along the nearly twelve kilometers of the Diagonal will explain the role that design plays in our daily livesWith the mottoThink, design, act(Think, design, and act), the contest defendsdesign as a way to rethink society. And, along these lines, the next will take place on October 16thB Citizen Lab, a space for meeting, learning, and participatory idea generation that aims to foster the construction of a more prosperous, inclusive, and sustainable Barcelona. The Elisava gardens of the Disseny Hub Barcelona will host this ideas laboratory with a series of talks on innovative solutions in the business field, with a citizen consultation based on challenges and opportunities associated with the objectives set by the UN in the 2030 Agenda, as well as with the collective formulation of ideas that allow building a sustainable future.
Food that enters through the eyes and a route through Turó Park
The creative potential of existing shops and design spaces in the vicinity of Turó Park will be highlighted on October 7 with the Turó Park Open Night: a route through the different furniture stores, home accessories, and emblematic galleries in the area, which will open their doors in the evening with the intention of showing citizens their carefully curated establishments and all the activity they carry out.
One of the highlights and new features of this edition of the BDW City Festival is the Food Design Week, a special program that will showcase the talent of local food designers with routes, exhibitions, and gastronomic experiences where, among other things, one can learn techniques to combat food waste or discover the close relationship between art and gastronomy.
"Food design is a discipline born from design and as such has a transformative function. Its object of study is food and people. The results of Food Design propose new ways of eating, preparing, experimenting, cooking. In addition, it outlines new models of use and organization with sustainability as a transversal axis," explains Anna Achón, head of the Food Design area at Barcelona Centre de Disseny. All this in a year in which the city is the capital of sustainable food and hosts hundreds of activities around it. "Food defines who we are as people and as a society. We say that food design creates a new city narrative because it defines us within new scenarios, new ways of experimenting, creating, consuming, and eating," comments Achón.
The creative space Momentos Alhambra at La Muriel bar (Verntallat, 30) will feature, from October 27 to 30, a special program that includes The Zero Waste Workshop, a workshop created to raise awareness of climate and environmental problems and value the need to generate a minimum of waste in our daily lives. Here, participants will be the designers of the dishes and will play with ingredients creating tapas, while making use of recycled materials. Within the idea of discovering gastronomy from a new point of view, the Future Food Scenarios workshop, for its part, proposes reimagining food design and designing new future scenarios to turn them into agents of change in our society. In parallel, along with other workshops and installations, all those who visit La Muriel bar in Gràcia during those four days, by consuming a beer, will be able to enjoy the food design tapa for free: The mindfulness mushroom, created for the occasion by chef Xavi Morón.
Exhibitions with local creators
With the aim of supporting the city's creative impulse through its creators, the Il·lacions gallery (La Rambla, 130) will host a series of exhibitions that seek to promote reflection from a contemporary vision of elements present in everyday life: from food, clothing, to kitchen utensils or furniture. The apron, converted into a work tool where functionality and aesthetic expression merge, is the central piece of the exhibition Davantals!, by Josep Abril, which can be visited from October 7 to December 3 and where the role of this unique piece of clothing is analyzed by the award-winning fashion designer. "It is the piece of the uniform where I have always been freest to experiment," Abril himself acknowledges. "Not being the skin piece (the first one that dresses the body), it allows more play of material, shape, color to build a specific discourse," explains the Barcelona designer.
Also responsible for standardizing the uniforms of numerous catering businesses, clubs, hotels, and spas, Abril brings together for the occasion a selection of the designs he has made over the years. "Each of them is part of a much broader project, but we enjoyed highlighting this piece that normally goes unnoticed, and that I really enjoy working on," he points out. Transmitting values and meeting very specific needs is the essence of a job that Abril has masterfully projected and that is now collected in this exhibition.
Recycling at El Celler de Can Roca
The talent of the Roca brothers goes beyond the kitchen of El Celler de Can Roca and, in a pioneering initiative to reduce waste through the use of design, they created Roca Recicla in 2018, under the creative direction of Andreu Carulla. Since then, the work in research and development of different solutions has given shape to functional objects with great added value that now, thanks to the BDW, are presented to the general public with the exhibition Roca Recicla curated by Andreu Carulla.
In choosing the pieces present in the Il·lacions gallery, Carulla himself tells us that he based it on products "that explain the values of Roca Recicla well, that are purchasable and beautiful" and that, in turn, are accompanied by a limited series of posters and t-shirts designed for Run Design, the team responsible for the project's branding. When assessing how design acts as an active agent in waste reduction, Carulla states that it does so "to the extent that the designer is aware and capable of transmitting it to their client." Although it is not always necessary, because, as he himself acknowledges: "More and more, the client themselves is pushing to achieve this reduction. This is the case of El Celler de Can Roca."
Without leaving the gastronomic aspect, in the same Il·lacions space, until January 3, you can also see Objects in the Bauhaus Kitchen, an exhibition of unreleased pieces resulting from the artistic-gastronomic experience created by Elsa Yranzo and Sebastian Alberdi together with more than 60 creatives from the Barcelona scene to honor the centenary of the Weimar school. Cutlery, crockery and tableware, among others, follow one another accompanied by the film created by director Joan Simó and which gathers the entire experience of the project.
The little ones of the house can also experiment and let their ingenuity flourish during the BDW City Festival. Among the proposals is We Are All Arcimboldo, a children's happening around the figure of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, known for his Mannerist representations of human faces from flowers, fruits, plants, animals and objects. The eccentric portraits of the famous Italian artist will serve as a pretext to create a great joint work with fruits, vegetables and greens, among all the children who come on October 15 to The Inspiration House Bonanova (Pg Bonanova, 9).
Along with this, dozens of creative initiatives around recycling, transmedia narrative, sustainability, co-creation spaces and tools or the role of design in socialization, are included in a very complete agenda open to citizens to make this event of the BDW 2021 City Festival an authentic creative, sensitizing and inspiring festival for all.