Scenographies for a City – Festival
Bilbao BBK Live is one of Spain’s most important music festivals, drawing thousands of people each year. It takes place annually on Mount Kobetamendi, just outside Bilbao. For three days, renowned international and local artists perform across multiple outdoor stages, creating an experience that fuses music and culture.
Since 2015, Zuloark has collaborated as the art director, designing and constructing the festival’s infrastructures and stage sets. This work has allowed us to delve into circular design strategies, emphasizing material reuse and regenerative architecture. Additionally, we have developed research and experimentation around spaces designed for celebration.
The City – Festival
The biggest challenge of this project is to envision a festival-city that lasts three days and hosts 150,000 people, while efficiently managing resources—material, environmental, and human.
Second lives and circular materiality
In each edition of the festival, we commit to sustainable and circular design strategies, such as reusing materials from stage designs from previous years. We design with local materials like wood, striving, whenever possible, to create designs using uncut pieces to facilitate recycling.
Nature as scenography
The festival takes place in a unique natural setting, and our work incorporates this environment into many of the stage designs, integrating the landscape as an essential part of the experience. Additionally, we include plant-based waste materials, gathered from maintenance and pruning efforts in the area throughout the year, into our designs.
Scenes for a party
The design is envisioned as a sensory environment that brings magic and mystery to life, reimagining infrastructures as spaces crafted for the extraordinary.
“The Campsite” co-design
One of Zuloark’s key roles in the festival is designing the collaborative working environment for the teams involved. Zuloark participates in every stage, from art direction to the construction of the stages. Production is organized in a format we call “The Camp”: a group that brings together a wide network of agents, from the Last Tour organizers to everyone involved in the conceptualization and construction of the stage designs.
Awards
The Bilbao BBK Live festival has been recognized by B Corp as a festival that “meets the highest environmental and social standards, placing the planet at the core of its strategy to make a positive impact”.
In 2019, the Basoa stage from Bilbao BBK Live 2018 won the “Festival Of The Future Awards”.
Additionally, in 2020, Bilbao BBK Live received the “Best Major Festival powered by SGAE” and “Best Infrastructure” awards at the 2020 Iberian Festival Awards.
