20th, 21st and 22nd of June 2025

Ecosystemic festival of arts, music, and ephemeral architecture

Rizomes is a festival born once a year in the heart of a poplar plantation in La Cellera de Ter, Girona. An ephemeral cultural space in search of old and new ways of doing, where play and collective experimentation take center stage.

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Line up

Tree farm

The festival is just a brief phase of an ecosystem that lives all year round: 15,000 trees, configured in a 5 x 5 meter grid, in constant growth and mutation.

Every year, 315 adult poplars are cut down for timber production. These give way to 315 newborn poplars, which will grow and live rooted in the plantation for more than two decades. This cycle of renewal, of life and death, is an integral fact of Rizomes. Everything is movement, and movement is an opportunity for the renewal of creative avenues.

Using the limitations and possibilities of this peculiar spatial configuration, the festival reinvents itself with each new cycle. The fluctuating grid invites us to adapt each year, to collectively find renewed solutions for the design and distribution of the festival facilities, in line with agricultural activity.

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Art & Spaces

Rizomes is a creative platform for musicians, designers, architects, visual artists, and creators of all kinds.

Year after year we create a rhizomatic network of interrelated installations, with the grid of trees as the initial game board. Each edition of the festival is the result of co-creation between different artists, designers, musicians and architects.

We also promote artistic production through REG, an annual call for artistic and architectural installations that takes place in residence on the plantation. The results become part of Rizomes' artistic ecosystem.

The natural space hosting the festival is productive, inclusive, and performative.

Using the wood from trees felled by autumn winds or bamboo canes harvested for fiber sanitation, we create the necessary infrastructures for cultural production: building showers or ashtrays, responsibly channeling water from the canal for hygiene or dishwashing, and crafting chairs, bars, stands, and backstage areas.

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Sustainability

Festivals should be defined as a harmonious balance between human free expression, cultural promotion, and environmental protection.

Our main challenge is to integrate into the forest and leave no trace behind. Every year, we reduce our ecological footprint to achieve zero impact.

Environmental sustainability goes hand in hand with economic sustainability. We measure sustainability from four perspectives: conditioning the space to reduce electrical consumption, a conscious management of potable and non-potable water, the use of recycled, donated, or reused materials for building infrastructures and a maximum reduction of waste and creation of compost.

Rizomes
Ecosystemic festival of arts, music and architecture, in the forest

hola@rizomes.com

Bosc de Can Ribes
La Cellera de Ter
Girona, España

Pierre Bastien

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At the age of ten, Pierre Bastien built a two-string guitar from the elements of the educational game "Le Petit Physicien". At the age of fifteen, he made his first machine with a metronome that struck a cymbal on one side and a frying pan on the other.

A few years later, he began building his own orchestra of robots, made from elements of Mecano (the famous construction toy) that play instruments from the world, everyday and intricate objects. With this "Mecanium" he records his albums, performs, holds sound art exhibitions and has collaborated with renowned artists such as Pierrick Sorin, Pascal Comelade, Robert Wyatt, Issey Miyake, Roberto Oliván among others. His music has been published by several labels: Gazul, G33G, InPolysons, Signature, Western Vinyl, Morphine Records, Discrepant, Marionette and Rephlex.

"Like everyone else, I started by playing the rattle. Like many, I continued by tying a piece of cardboard to the wheel of my bicycle to turn it into an automatic rattle. Like some, I blew on a flower petal as if it were a saxophone; I imitated the wind with a twisted string and a button turning and buzzing; I played melodies with a pencil on my teeth, opening my mouth more or less.

I still rely on these types of childhood experiences. I try to give them an extension with the machines I build: from Mecano and musical instruments, from trafficked record players, from wind and paper. These early activities seem to me to be an undervalued tradition of Western music. Perhaps our essential tradition."

At Rizomes, Pierre will offer a concert on Ter Stage accompanied, as usual, by some elements of his "Mecanium".

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