Barcelona to be the guest city at Beijing Design Week 2014
The Minister of Culture, Ferran Mascarell, the Mayor of the Barcelona, Xavier Trias, and the director of the Institut Ramon Llull, Àlex Susanna, announced this morning at a press conference at the headquarters of the IRL that Barcelona will be the guest city at Beijing Design Week (BJDW) in 2014. The BJDW is the most important design, architecture and contemporary creation festival in Asia and is consolidating itself as one of the most important in the world. The Insititut Ramon Llull, in collaboration with the Department of Culture and Barcelona City Council, has been working for the last two years to achieve this invitation, a unique opportunity to demonstrate the excellence of our design and architecture at an international level, and to expose the companies in this sector to the Asian giant’s market.
The Minister of Culture, Ferran Mascarell, pointed out that “this is an event of the highest importance for the country, and the Catalan Government and the City Council will be working together.” Mascarell said that “in Catalonia there are 6,000 creative companies employing 74,000 people with an annual turnover of €14 billion. This group of companies and industries have close links with the design and creative schools in this country. As I have said before, this is a country with an enormous amount of talent and this generates the need to seek out new markets and export internationally.” Finally, he mentioned that, “this event is a landmark to consolidate the trademark of our culture with an event of this magnitude.”
For his part, the mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias, expressed his satisfaction to be able to announce this project that “did not fall from the skies”, and he recalled that “my first institutional trip as mayor was to China. I met the mayor of Beijing and we began to talk of the possibility of them extending this invitation to us. This is not improvised; we have worked hard in the last two years to make it happen,” and he stressed that the invitation has come in an especially important year “due to the opening of Barcelona Hub.”
The director of the IRL, Àlex Susanna, stated that “this is the most important project for the international projection of our culture since the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2007” and he stressed the significance of the BJDW for two principal reasons: the importance of the Chinese market as well as the sectors directly involved: architecture, design, urban planning and contemporary creation. Susanna also pointed out that “Beijing is a great opportunity to generate business, and as a result, we believe that there is a dense, rich fabric of businesses, studios, offices and creators that could get involved with it. We want to shine the spotlight on these companies since the power to generate business that is offered is now more timely than ever.”
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The project, backed by the IRL, was presented today by Mayor Trias and Culture Minister Mascarell
