Open Letter from the Flow Strike Working Group

4th of August, 2025

To our fellow artists, cultural workers, festival audiences, and comrades around the world,

One year ago, we came together at Flow Festival in Helsinki to make a collective refusal. We didn’t want our voices, work, or music to be used to serve the interests of private equity firms that are increasingly taking over the cultural life—particularly by a firm like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), whose capital sustains Israel’s settler-colonial regime through direct and indirect investments.

The campaign began with symbolic actions inside the festival: speeches during performances, demonstrations from within, quiet refusals, and countless Palestinian flags. What started at Flow 2024 has grown far beyond. Over the past twelve months, this refusal has echoed globally.

In Europe alone, boycott campaigns have targeted Sónar (Barcelona), Field Day (London), Mighty Hoopla (London), Resurrection Fest (Spain), Viña Rock (Spain), Monegros Desert Festival (Spain), Arenal Sound (Spain), FIB – Benicàssim (Spain), O Son do Camiño (Spain), Tsunami Xixón (Spain), Øyafestivalen (Norway), Lost Village (UK), Zwarte Cross (Netherlands) and Milkshake Festival (Netherlands), to name some. 

KKR’s 2025 acquisition of Boiler Room further expanded the campaign, triggering widespread boycotts. In response, we aligned our strategy with comrades around the world.

This year, we do not campaign from within Flow as we did last year. The 2025 strike is full and public. We are also calling for an audience boycott: a refusal to attend or support any cultural event owned by Superstruct Entertainment or its parent company, KKR.

KKR is not merely involved in festivals. It is a private equity giant with a track record of extracting profit from essential services—housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and now, cultural capital. Superstruct, the festival conglomerate KKR owns, is just the surface. We are targeting the root. Our actions align with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which insists that companies complicit in Israeli apartheid must be excluded from cultural life until they fully divest.

It is not enough to pressure individual festivals or merely Superstruct. We must dismantle the structural conditions of complicity underlying them. 

Flow Festival and its owner, Superstruct Entertainment, claim their profits are reinvested into the festivals. This may be partly true, but it is not the whole picture. As these festivals grow in value, so too does the value of KKR’s portfolio. When KKR eventually sells these assets, the returns can directly fund its broader activities—including, but not limited to, the oppression of Palestinians.

This entanglement of capital and colonial violence isn’t unique to Palestine. In January 2025, Wet’suwet’en land defenders protested Boiler Room in Tkaronto (Toronto), disrupting an event to denounce KKR’s role in the Coastal GasLink pipeline—a fossil fuel megaproject forced through unceded territory without consent. The Wet’suwet’en have opposed this incursion for years through ceremony, legal action, and resistance, despite facing police raids and criminalization. That protest ignited a global wave of Boiler Room boycotts, underscoring that every node in KKR’s cultural empire is structurally linked to extractivism, dispossession, and colonial force.

Our decolonial stance cannot be selective. Saying “no” to KKR also means standing with Wet’suwet’en defenders. All struggles against colonial capital are connected.

What do we mean by decolonization in this context?

For us, decolonization means refusing to let settler-colonial violence be laundered through art. It means recognizing that most cultural spaces are embedded in financial systems with political and ethical consequences. No progressive branding or curated line-up can justify profits built on arms sales, forced evictions, or apartheid infrastructure – or vice versa.

Decolonizing demands reparations. Harm is not only symbolic or ideological—it is material. Decolonization requires the redirection of wealth and resources from extractive corporate profits to the communities harmed by those same systems. KKR and its affiliates must provide real accountability and direct reparations: to Palestinian communities, to Indigenous nations resisting colonial incursion, and to cultural workers exploited by the industries they finance.

Decolonizing also invites us to reimagine the role of culture. It means building mutual support structures—artist to artist, worker to worker—across borders and genres, beyond the funding chains that reinforce exploitation. It means refusing to let our art serve as cover for capital. It means recognizing that joy and resistance are not contradictions but co-conspirators.

When we speak about decolonizing Flow Festival, we do not suggest it can be decolonized under its current ownership. That would require KKR to decolonize its global operations. Until then, we follow the stance of Spain’s Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, who stated that KKR is “not welcome in Spain,” adding that companies with interests in illegal settlements “cannot operate normally in the European Union.” We believe both Flow Festival and Tuska Festival, also owned by KKR, should not be allowed to operate in Helsinki.

We are artists, DJs, poets, writers, sound engineers, philosophers, activists and audience members who understand that Flow Festival has been captured by corporate interests. But we also know there is another kind of power: one built through solidarity, refusal, and shared struggle. That is the power we choose.

Last year, we forged the pathway to the unknown—now we walk it together with clarity, courage, and collective purpose. This is not a moment. It is a movement.

Recently, activists came together to launch the Artist Mutual Aid Fund initiative (AMAF) in solidarity with those participating in Flow Strike by withdrawing their labour from Flow Festival. Born from the need to build community-led alternatives in the absence of institutional support, AMAF practices mutual aid: caring for each other when the system does not. It supports especially marginalized and low-income artists—those for whom ethical action may mean lost bookings, lost income, or lost visibility. This is not charity; it is collective responsibility. Contribute to the fundraiser here.

In solidarity and refusal,
Flow Strike Working Group

1. Flow Festival creates ethical guidelines for its operations especially regarding its partners.
2. Flow Festival dissociates from partners affiliated with Israel.
3. Flow Festival's owner, KKR, divests from Israeli companies and companies that do business with the state of Israel.

If these demands are not possible to meet, the only option is to have Flow Festival's licence to operate in Helsinki removed.