The Madrid Design Festival is an event truly rich in opportunities for learning, dialogue and social interaction. Here, design is experienced at 360 degrees and even seemingly lateral moments—such as lunches, informal talks or convivial moments—are opportunities for discovery. Here is a small selection of design events and initiatives we witnessed during the festival's opening days.

Designing repopulation

Among the Madrid Design Festival (MDF) locations is the Institute of Free Education (Institución Libre de Enseñanza). The building that accommodates various installations has a recent work by Madrilenian studio, amid.cero9, characterised by an enclosure made of iron rods, which creates a metal cocoon that allows light to filter inside. From container to content: among the installations on view, there are quite a few worthy of note. The most intriguing is undoubtedly Diseñando la repoblación (Designing repopulation), a project through which Catalan designer Andreu Carulla reflects (and tries to act) on the theme of rural depopulation. There are currently more than 8,000 villages in Spain, almost 5,000 of which have fewer than 100 inhabitants. Carulla decided to move his studio and all his tools to one of these small settlements (in Gistaín, Alta Aragón) for 10 days. Here he made a series of wooden furniture with the help of the inhabitants of the village, which is characterised by a deep-rooted craft tradition. The works on display are distinguished by their raw, unfinished and archaic character.

Party at ACdO

One of the most anticipated occasions of this design festival is an evening soiree hosted by designer Alvaro Catalán de Ocón, organised in his studio: a moment dedicated to sociability, but where it is also possible to discover the work of young and promising local designers.

Miguel Milá

The Fernán Gómez Cultural Centre is the space that hosts the main exhibitions of the Madrid Design Festival, those conceived and produced, especially for the annual event. This year, one of the three exhibitions is dedicated to one of the great masters of Spanish design, Miguel Milá, an internationally recognised figure (he was awarded the prestigious ADI Compasso d'Oro for Lifetime Achievements in 2008). The exhibition interweaves the personal trajectory and creations of the Catalan designer, born in 1931, through eight rooms, housing more than 200 pieces—from prototypes to more recent works—original designs and drawings.

Talks by Federica Biasi and Simon Stanislawski

Madrid Design PRO is a programme of lectures and conversations that takes place during the festival's opening days. I attended the one by Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek and Intersections, a conversation curated by Annalisa Rosso with Federica Biasi and Simon Stanislawski, two designers with different, or rather, seemingly opposite approaches. During the conversation, however, Rosso finds broad areas of convergence between the two practices and a common approach to research.

Museo ICO

Among the design exhibitions I looked at most carefully in Madrid are those organised by the Museo ICO, usually dedicated to noteworthy Spanish designers or international architects (in past editions of the MDF I have seen very comprehensive exhibitions on Anna Heringer and Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza). The exhibition Colonisation Towns. Glances at an Invented Landscape recounts the process of transformation of rural Spain, carried out between 1939 and 1971 by the National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), which planned the construction of new hydraulic infrastructures and more than 300 villages that mobilised 60,000 families. “We looked for the architecture, we met the people,” say exhibition curators Ana Amado and Andrés Patiño Erin, who together with extensive archival documentation and original works, display photographs and videos of their immersions in today's rural landscape.

Tramo Restaurant

A stop-off between one studio and another, the Tramo restaurant turned out to be the most interesting destination of the day. The main objective of the authors—architecture firm SelgasCano and product designer Andreu Carulla—was to enhance the existing structure, particularly the roof with its concrete beams. Tramo is based on collaborative processes, experimentations and designing solutions focused on self-sufficiency, regeneration and social inclusion.

Lucas Muñoz Muñoz Studio Visit

Lucas Muñoz Muñoz is one of the most interesting figures on the Madrilenian independent scene. The designer overcomes the dualism between craft and industry, between the handmade and the mass-produced; he explores hybridisations and viable alternatives, rejecting the industrial as an extractive and exhausting mechanism.

Lucas shows us some prototypes, the research he carries out as a preliminary phase of some projects, material experiments and the model of an interior project he is currently working on. Visiting the studio and talking about his practice informally allows us to go beyond the limits of the exhibition and get to know his work in depth.

Madrid Design Festival Awards

Madrid Design Festival Awards: A celebratory moment in which new talent or beautiful projects can be discovered. This year the main prize, in the Professionals category, went to architect Andrés Jaque and the entire team of the Office for Political Innovation, for the Reggio School project, a recently completed educational infrastructure in northern Italy.

Madrid is hosting the seventh edition of the Madrid Design Festival from February 8 to March 17, 2024.