From 24 to 31 March, the 6th edition of Xtremkuir Week takes place, the leather week organised by the art and design school La Gaspar in Igualada.

It is a week of innovation and creativity that seeks to bring together different disciplines (design, craftsmanship, leather, fashion, communication, technology, new materials…). Over the course of the week, students of Advertising Graphics, Audiovisual Graphics and Leather Accessory Craftsmanship at La Gaspar work in teams, intensively, in order to complete a project.

The activity was born in the 2013-2014 academic year and has been held every two years ever since. This year’s theme is to explore new avenues and put forward creative proposals for the accessories and fashion sector in relation to reuse and the use of recycled materials. This year’s Xtremkuir Week is linked to a collaboration project with the Nzuri Daima Foundation.

Nzuri Daima is a foundation created to drive social change in areas of particular inequality and vulnerability of rights. The foundation focuses on creating projects to foster education through culture as a means of transformation and to achieve fairer, more sustainable living standards in communities, with particular emphasis on children and the most unprotected groups. The foundation’s aim is to bring about a change of outlook in the field of human rights through specific projects. It is part of the coordinating body of solidarity NGOs of the province of Girona. Its activity is focused both nationally and internationally. At present, the place where it has the greatest presence is East Africa, specifically the countries of Uganda, Tanzania and South Sudan.

This year’s Xtremkuir has been devoted to the Pink Revolution project. In Uganda, getting girls onto wheels is not easy. Most twelve-year-old girls, when they start secondary education, cannot ride a bicycle. There is a belief that the potholes and bumps will break their hymen and that they will therefore lose their virginity. As a result, they cannot do one of the most important things for them: go to school to learn. This is because the schools are very far from where they live and the time it takes them to reach the schools on foot does not allow them to meet the obligations they have at home, so many of them drop out of their studies.

This is why the Pink Revolution project was born, with the aim of changing this belief among relatives and neighbours and enabling girls to keep going to school. The project provides the girls with pink bicycles that give them independence and safety. The bicycles are for secondary school students and are bought second-hand in Uganda, repaired and painted pink. The foundation works with a network of schools that identifies the girls who live furthest away and are most in need. These actions also help to raise awareness among the population.

Following Paola Cirelli’s lecture on sustainable brands, and after reflections on social and ethical values in the design and creation of products, each La Gaspar team has to design a bag/backpack (bikepacking) following criteria of sustainability and versatility. The purpose of these bags is to make it easier to carry school materials on the girls’ journey to school. It will be considered an added value if they can also carry other kinds of material for their everyday needs. The bag must be adaptable so that it can be fastened to the bicycle itself while also being usable as a street backpack.

As part of Xtremkuir Week, organised by La Gaspar, there is also a programme of lectures in which Leather Cluster Barcelona took part. On Friday 24 March, Jordi Vidal, the cluster’s executive director, gave a talk to the students entitled Leather: a sustainable resource. The session took the form of a learning journey from the origin and raison d’être of leather through consumer sociology, focusing on the leather sector as a key player in the circular economy and sustainable fashion. A presentation was also given on the ecosystem, projects and future strategic challenges of Leather Cluster Barcelona.

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