Chapter 1 (KIN’s Opening Ceremony) will take place from 18:30pm – 23:30pm on Friday, November 9th, at Arnolfini, Bristol.

Tickets for the Opening Ceremony cost £15+bf for adults, and £7.50+bf for young adults (ages 13-17). Book your tickets HERE.*

(*Please note, the KIN ‘full weekend’ tickets do not include entry to Monika Bulaj’s exhibition – a specific Opening Ceremony ticket must be bought for this.)

Chapter 1: What to expect

Food, drink & ideas

Join the KIN collaborators and activists for the opening evening of KIN festival, in conjunction with Bristol youth network Rife Magazine, as we gather to break bread together and share food, drink and ideas. We’ll hear from some of the people who have curated the event and have chance to set intentions for the weekend.

Monika Bulaj’s Sacred Crossings / Where Gods Whisper

A talk with images, stories, movies, sounds.

We are very humbled to have the esteemed Polish photographer, writer, reporter and TED fellow Monika Bulaj with us to open the evening, presenting an amazing show of her photos, travels, ideas and kinships.

Monika’s beautiful, moving and painting-like photographs blur religious and cultural divisions, re-imagining identities and blurring borders. In this multi-media story telling presentation we travel to areas of the world where faiths meet, zones are besieged by armed fanatics, homelands are lost and where resources are shared.

These moving portraits show the raw power of photography, allowing us to see the world afresh, from Central Asia to Latin America, from Russia to the Middle East – glimmering with evocative images in colour and black and white: the Dionysian rites of Muslims in Maghreb, the mourn of deads in the Balkans, the pilgrimages in the mud on the Urals, the evocation of the gods in exile overseas. She documents the ‘smugglers’ of the past, in Haiti and Cuba, where the spiritual strength of Mother Earth becomes ritual voodoo, santeria, mystical rap, samba, epithalamium and mystery.

Photo credit/copyright: Monika Bulaj.