The exhibition won the 2023 Ciutat d’Igualada Award in the “Disseny Gaspar Camps” category

On Thursday 19 September the presentation took place of the exhibition Hàptica, la pell amb les mans, by the artist Jordi Ribaudí, and of the audiovisual display CODI by Carmina Orgué, interior designer. Both can be visited free of charge until 27 October at the Igualada Leather Museum.

Both won the 2023 Gaspar Camps Design Award, the former in the discipline of industrial design and the latter in interior design. This award forms part of the Ciutat d’Igualada Awards.

The Ciutat d’Igualada Awards are organised by the Culture Department of Igualada Town Council. The Design category is named after Gaspar Camps and aims to recognise talent within the world of design in its various fields. It is an award that has the support of the bodies Disseny=Igualada, Disseny Marked and the Gaspar Camps Municipal School of Art.

The event, open to the public, took place in the Encavallades hall of the Igualada Leather Museum and was chaired by Carme Riera i Minguet, 1st Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture and Public Health of Igualada Town Council.

The exhibition “Hàptica, la pell amb les mans” offers a singular artistic experience that fuses leather and art in an innovative way, in which Jordi Ribaudí presents a selection of his most personal creations in which leather is the common thread.

Jordi Ribaudí was chosen as the winner in the “industrial design” category for his work combining craftsmanship and design, with the use of local materials such as Igualada leather.

According to Ribaudí, “Leather, or more precisely hide, carries –beyond its characteristics as a material– a conceptual weight that makes it possible to develop paths reaching into every aspect of human life. Whether we speak of the sensory, symbolic, cultural or simply physical world, the relationship between man and the use of leather goes back to the moment when we came down from the trees and began to build our world with our hands.”

Jordi Ribaudí Trepat, an industrial designer by training and an artisan by inclination, presents a selection in which you can see unique pieces that are usually found in contemporary design galleries, together with furniture pieces manufactured in small series under the TORU brand that he himself founded in 2016.

In recent years his creations have achieved a high profile in the field of leather design and craftsmanship, precisely because he is one of the few creators who works this material from a contemporary perspective.

His works seek to renew the image of leather, breaking with visual codes to produce objects with innovative shapes and sensations.

Jordi Ribaudí makes his pieces exclusively with vegetable-tanned leather from Igualada tanneries. He selects hides from adult animals that result in leathers whose wrinkles and marks bear witness to a life lived.

Leather Cluster Barcelona encourages you to visit Jordi Ribaudí’s exhibition Hàptica, la pell amb les mans, and is grateful that the Ciutat d’Igualada Gaspar Camps Awards highlight the value of design and provide an incentive for designers in our country.

In this regard, the cluster is also working on specific projects to give visibility to Catalan leather fashion artisans and designers, such as its own space at REC.0, la Pell del Rec, and its collaboration in Crafts2B (Innovation Brands Crafts).

The cluster took part in the first Crafts2B meeting to foster co-creation between innovative companies and high-end craftsmanship with the aim of generating business opportunities and expanding the market for the Catalan craft sector, and it has collaborated during the start of this project by contributing, among other things, to identifying leading leather artisans in Catalonia.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector and its value chain within the framework of Shared Value policies. The cluster is an accredited body within the Catalonia Clusters programme and has the support of Acció.