KIN festival cancelled

A four-day event from the people behind Shambala festival has been cancelled a week before it was due to take place at the Arnolfini.

KIN was described as “a gathering for those yearning for a kinder world”.

Acts booked for the event between November 8 and 11 included Monika Bulaj, The Slumflower, Paul Mason, Kid Carpet and Drag Queen Story Time.

KIN organisers announced the news “with a very heavy heart and great regret”, offering full refunds to all ticket buyers.

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A statement said: “We want to say a huge and heartfelt thank you to everybody who has booked a ticket for KIN and shown their support – and apologise to those who had set their weekend aside to join us.

“KIN was designed on an ambitious scale; a multi-space event over four days, because we felt the challenges we face in our societies are considerable, and the event needed to represent that scale. This also meant the cost of the production was a high one, and needed a certain amount of ticket sales and revenue to realise these costs.

“Sadly this target has not been met and with the news that we did not secure grant funding, nor get additional financial support from partner businesses has meant that the cost of funding the event was left solely to ourselves to meet. This quite simply is untenable for a small business like ours.

“This decision to cancel KIN has been an extremely difficult one for us to make; the whole team has worked around the clock to put together an inspirational and unique programme. All the event crew, partners, artists and content contributors have given their all to KIN in terms of support, energy and belief in what we were trying to achieve. Even with cancelling the event we are shouldering a significant loss of costs that that have been incurred to date. Carrying on with the event would have meant doubling this amount.

“We first started planning KIN well over a year ago against the backdrop and as a reaction to the deep divisions not only in our country, but also around the world. KIN was to be an antidote to the rhetoric of hate-politics; a place where people who know that values such as compassion, tolerance and empathy are ones to nurture, uphold and spread far and wide.

“This is not the final word on KIN, and whilst we can hold our hands up and say that this particular model did not work, our intentions remain, to bring together our various communities and networks to navigate these very difficult times on our planet.

“KIN is a very much-needed event of our times. Maybe not on this planned ambitious scale or in this specific format. But we know that collectively we need to present to the world, a much more beautiful and kinder alternative than the one that is being presented to us today.”