In a forested corner of northern Estonia, Indrek Kasela is building a festival without VIPs, algorithms or corporate gloss, where cinema, art and music are treated not as entertainment, but as a way of making life feel larger.
There are festivals, and then there is KiKuMu. For Indrek Kasela, the entrepreneur, art patron, cinema owner and now festival organiser behind it, the difference is not a matter of branding but of intent.
What he has built in northern Estonia, now returning for its second edition, is less a conventional festival than a giant salon in the woods: a place where artists share equal billing, no one wears a VIP wristband and the point is not simply to entertain, but to send people home charged with energy and ideas.
Janar Ala, one of Estonia’s most perceptive cultural journalists, has described KiKuMu as “the festival with no assholes”. Even if one slips through, Kasela says, the setting seems to remove the temptation to behave like one. “Maybe they even rediscover the good human inside themselves,” he says.
KiKuMu made its debut last summer to strong reviews and returns from 9 to 12 July at the Jäneda Training Centre, with nearly 40 artists, a newly opened manor house and a clearer sense than ever of what it wants to be.
The cultural builder
Indrek Kasela did not arrive at cultural institution-building from nowhere. Over more than two decades, he has helped shape Estonia’s cultural landscape. In 2010, he co-founded Temnikova & Kasela art gallery with Olga Temnikova; the gallery has since become one of the most internationally respected contemporary art spaces to emerge from the Nordic-Baltic region. He revived and now runs Kino Sõprus, Tallinn’s oldest art house cinema, and was also among the founders of Kai Art Center at Noblessner.
KiKuMu, then, is not a side project, nor some late-career vanity festival. It is where the strands of Kasela’s work meet: cinema, visual art, music and a long-held belief that culture is one of the ways people make sense of being alive.
“The role of culture is to inspire, to make you feel part of something bigger than your everyday routine,” he says. “Humans define themselves through common experiences: festivals, books, films, theatre. They help you find meaning.
“You should go home feeling inspired, energised, even if you have been up all night dancing or talking to a newly found friend. I don’t see festivals as places to escape. I see them as places where you find meaning and the power to live.”
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From frustration to festival
KiKuMu grew out of both frustration and admiration. Kasela had watched small, serious Estonian festivals, the kind with adventurous programming and devoted niche audiences, vanish one after another, undone by economic realities that simply did not work.
The admiration came from Gilles Peterson, the British DJ, broadcaster, record label founder and global tastemaker whose work has long connected jazz, soul, electronic music and sounds from around the world.
“Gilles has shaped the taste in music for most of us for decades,” Kasela says. He had been going to Peterson’s We Out Here festival in the UK since it began, and saw in it a model for how to build a genuinely diverse programme: live acts alongside DJs, established names alongside emerging voices.
“I wanted to try something similar in the Baltics,” he says. “We wanted to take it even further by bringing in well-curated art and cinema, hence the name KiKuMu, from the Estonian words kino, kunst and muusika, meaning cinema, art and music.”
The setting was never incidental. Jäneda’s 1975 training centre, designed by the landscape architect Valve Pormeister, is ranked among the ten most important architectural landmarks in Estonia from the past century. Nearby stands the manor house, whose former mistress is said to have entertained H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorky and the man believed to have inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond, giving the place a faintly novelistic charge. This year, for the first time, the 1915 manor house itself becomes part of the festival.
“I cannot stop wandering around the building and being amazed at how interestingly it has been designed,” Kasela says. “Valve Pormeister was primarily a landscape architect, and you can see how well she integrated it with nature. The symbiosis of the old manor and the modernist school is insane. There is this crazy aura around the place.”
No algorithms, only surprises
KiKuMu 2026 brings together nearly 40 artists, “we kind of went a little crazy”, Kasela admits, but the range is entirely deliberate. Its musical directors, Raul Saaremets and Siim Nestor, are given a largely free hand, with Kasela occasionally pushing for additions he regards as essential.
The programme is not assembled by an algorithm. “We don’t follow TikTok or Spotify to feed the masses,” he says. “We want to be full of surprises.” Several artists who could not make this year’s edition because of scheduling clashes have already been booked for 2027. “It is kind of crazy for an upstart boutique festival,” Kasela says, though he means it less as disbelief than as a statement of intent.
That democratic spirit extends to the way artists are presented. There are no headliners in the conventional sense, no smaller acts pushed to the margins while the weekend revolves around one marquee name.
“We want all our artists to be equally important,” Kasela says. “Not smaller acts relegated to the shadows. We only have headliners. And every person in the audience is equal. No VIP seats, no corporate lounges.”
Gilles Peterson closes the festival again, not as a headliner exactly, but as the final chapter. “I kind of liked the concept that he is the last DJ to play, a proper climax, the high-octane ending, like in a good movie,” Kasela says. “The last chapter must be written by a true genius like him.”
The Moscow question
Not everything about KiKuMu 2.0 has been smooth. Earlier this year, the festival cancelled its booking of A Guy Called Gerald, the Manchester producer whose album Black Secret Technology is regarded as a landmark of British jungle and drum and bass. The reason was his plan to perform at a festival in Moscow.
“It was heartbreaking,” Kasela says. “Gerald was the first artist I booked for this edition.” Kasela says he offered to fund a replacement show in Ukraine and asked Gerald to cancel the Moscow date. Gerald declined. KiKuMu pulled the booking.
Kasela is unflinching about the decision. “The only reason we can have our festival is because Ukrainians are dying every day to keep Russia from invading us. It would have been not only morally wrong but outright criminal to book an artist who cannot tell the difference between right and wrong.”
He says he told Gerald directly that performing at a Moscow festival tainted by Russian state propaganda was not a neutral act. “Peace through music doesn’t come from lending your artistic genius to a corrupt and murderous regime.”
The fallout, Kasela says, was largely positive. “We got a lot of support and positive reactions from people in Estonia and abroad, confirming it was the only decision we could make.”
Rather than overshadowing the festival, the controversy seems to have sharpened its identity, making clear that KiKuMu’s idea of culture is not detached from the world outside its stages.
A salon in the wilderness
The “no assholes” spirit, as Kasela defines it, is built into the festival’s structure. No VIP areas. No corporate sponsors setting the mood. A cinema programme entrusted entirely to the Kino Sõprus team. A visual art strand curated through the same networks that helped make Temnikova & Kasela a gallery seen at Art Basel and Frieze. And, still taking shape, a longer-term ambition to commission original work, with art and music created specifically for KiKuMu.
“Eventually, we want to get to a stage where we can commission original art and music for our festival,” Kasela says.
The festival will remain small. That, too, is a decision. “We want to keep the intimacy and the bond between the artists and the audience, so you can go and listen to Gilles Peterson and maybe see him jogging the following morning,” he says. Last year, Peterson had wanted to run, but a sprained ankle got in the way.
Five years from now, Kasela says, he hopes KiKuMu will become for the Estonian countryside what Kino Sõprus has become in Tallinn: something that “sails like a battleship destroying mediocrity and bad taste”. A small, exacting festival where artists and audiences feel free, alert and, in his words, “the power to live”.
“I don’t know exactly where it ends up,” he says. “But I hope it becomes a place where artists come to experiment, where they trust the audience. That it will be like a big salon of ideas in the wilderness.”
KiKuMu takes place 9–12 July 2026 at the Jäneda Training Centre, in Northern Estonia.
