Madrid Design Festival is an international event that will convert Madrid into the capital of design and elevate the city to a privileged position on the international arena. The festival will be held in February 2018 and will encompass all design disciplines, from architecture to graphic design, communications to interior design, all of them hybridising into a contemporary and innovative format. Madrid Design Festival is a widespread project that will infiltrate every corner of the city, becoming the very best tool to democratise design and transmit the importance of this discipline that transforms our lives each and every day. A language that can generate methodologies, change mentalities, positively alter our environment and, above all, redesign the world. The festival will be full of ambitious proposals that will place design on the city’s cultural calendar, attracting national and international visitors to its exhibits and workshops that will be held at different places throughout the capital. And to do so, Madrid Design Festival proposes a cross-disciplinary programme to showcase creations both from leading designers and new young professionals. Every February, the festival will convert Madrid into a city-wide celebration, opening the season during which the city becomes a cutting-edge space in the fields of design and creativity, with world renowned events like the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid and the ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair. Since its inception, Madrid Design Festival, devised and created by La Fábrica under the direction of Álvaro Matías, has worked in collaboration with an advisory committee made up of independent experts specialising in different fields: Fernando Gutiérrez, Toni Segarra, Ana Domínguez-Siemens, Paloma Cañizares, Juan Herreros, Alberto Barreiro, Izaskun Chinchilla and Jorge Penadés. Among the events, Rado Star Prize 2018 for young talents in design and, for the first time in Spain, the exhibition “Backstage, Jaime Hayon, from the Imaginary to Real”, a retrospective exhibition – curated by Ana Domínguez Siemens – of the works by Jaime Hayon, one of the most acclaimed designers of his generation. This exhibition shows some of the works he has created both for art installations and the companies for which he has designed products, although its aim is not to be a mere catalogue of furniture and objects. On the contrary, we have tried to express the least known side of the production process, with the ambition of revealing and explaining how products move from fiction into reality, not as if by magic, but through the hard work and dedication of businesspeople and artists who, hand-in-hand with the designer—respecting his philosophy and with the determination of translating it into technologically or by hand, modifying, correcting, adding, risking, removing, improving—make it possible for the pieces to come into being. Jaime Hayon has a special predilection for pure materials like wood, glass and pottery, and extensive knowledge of artisan production, in which he places special emphasis on his personal commitment to revive and revitalise—and not let die or slip into disuse—traditional handcrafting techniques that are in danger of extinction and for which he feels a deep respect.
