September 3 marks the start of the next edition of the Concéntrico International Festival of Architecture and Design in the Spanish city of Logroño, during which designers, creating installations in urban spaces, encourage residents and event participants to discover new places or take a different look at those already known. This year's edition of the festival will not lack Polish designers - an installation in public space was prepared by Iza Rutkowska, and an exhibition dedicated to the imagination of planetary architecture by the Centrala design group and the Bęc Zmiana Foundation.
© Concéntrico
Javier Peña Ibáñez, its director, talks about the idea of the festival and the invited artists.
Ola Kloc: What are the main ideas of the festival?
Javier Peña Ibáñez: The premise of the festival, which was founded in 2015, is to bring architecture and design closer to the ever-changing urban environment. In this development, we have been expanding our focus, wanting to integrate different visions and topics of debate from an international perspective, but operating in a specific environment such as the city of Logroño.
Ola: What is the main focus of the event?
Javier: The Concéntrico Festival has several objectives. On the one hand, we want to draw attention to practices such as architecture or design while showing their usefulness in everyday life. In the compulsory education system, these topics are not covered, so we have this basic function of disseminating and offering tools to better understand our urban context. On the other hand, we emphasize the idea that a city can have many answers. Sometimes a city is considered a one-way street, but during Concéntrico we make visible this imaginative/transformative capacity that built space has.
installation by Iza Rutkowska and Gregor Schneider
© Concéntrico
Ola: How do you select the artists and designers invited to participate in the festival?
Javier: We have different strategies. On the one hand, we have opened three international calls for the Information Pavilion project (Pabellón de infomación) and two for the Intervention project. In this way, we are opening up opportunities for studios we don't know who propose alternative projects to participate in the festival. On the other hand, we collaborate with various European cultural institutes, together with which we invite participants from their countries of origin: from Poland, Romania, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the Czech Republic. This gives us a variety of perspectives, and I, as curator, compensate for the type of practice or form of work of the teams through direct invitations to some participants.
The festival will last until September 6. We would like to take this opportunity to remind you of the participation of another Polish artist - Jakub Szczęsny - in last year's (and spring's, virtual) installment of the event, during which he presented a project of towers made of stools - Taburete Tower.
