26, 27 and 28th of june 2026

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

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

We promote artistic production through REG, an annual open call for artistic and architectural installations developed through a residency at the plantation. Year after year, we create a rhizomatic network of interrelated artistic installations, using the grid of trees as the initial game board.

The call aims to promote creation in Can Ribes' poplar plantation, taking advantage of its transformation into a cultural space of influx. The selected projects receive both economic and technical support, and are showcased during the festival.

+ info soon

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Architecture

Every summer the forest becomes a laboratory for experimentation in design and ephemeral architecture.

The CIRCULAR workshops become for an entire week a meeting point between tradition and contemporaneity, where dozens of participants blend into a workshop and learn to build and create as a community in fields such as carpentry, lighting, construction with bamboo and tension systems, or the alchemy of fire, earth, and water.

+ info soon

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Sustainability

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

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 infrastructuresm and a maximum reduction of waste through the creation of compost.

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Archive

Rizomes

Ecosystemic festival of arts,
music and architecture in the forest

hola@rizomes.com

Bosc de Can Ribes
La Cellera de Ter
Girona, España

Svantje Busshoff

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Artist Svantje Busshoff explores graphic patterns and structures, following processes of erasure and deconstruction. Her work investigates the void as a territory full of possibilities, incorporating techniques as diverse as painting, textile exploration and sound art. At Rizomes, Svantje will present ‘Música perforada’, a series of four sound pieces conceived for the pianola. This instrument, an automated piano created in the 19th century, works on the same principle as the Jacquard loom and the first computers: a strip of perforated cardboard mechanises the melody according to a binary system. When one of the holes in the cardboard exposes a hole in the reader, a pressure difference is created, and the air stored in the bellows drives the wooden hammers that strike the selected piano strings, producing the programmed sound.

In ‘Música perforada’, Svantje will be joined by several accompanists. ‘Spitze mit Herz’, one of the pieces presented, will be performed in collaboration with Girona's lacemakers association (Associació de Puntaires de Girona). In this piece, which draws parallels between the perforated paper of the pianola and that used by industrial lacing machines, several lacemakers will accompany the pianola with the direct sound of bobbins. Another piece, ‘The Woodworm Suite’, will be accompanied by the violinist Branislav Grbic. 'Lochstreifen Toccata' and 'Requiem para un mercado' will also be presented.

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