Songs of Solidarity 2026 – Anthems of Resistance

Anthems are epics sung together. They carry memory through time: stories of what people survived, what they fought for, what they refused to surrender, and the worlds they were able to imagine from within the conditions of their own lives.

The theme of Songs of Solidarity Festival 2026, Anthems of Resistance, takes its name from Ali Husain Mir’s book documenting the Progressive Writers’ Movement, which emerged in the 1930s in resistance to injustice, colonialism and imperialism. Its poets understood writing not as something separate from the world, but as a way of living within it: of naming what was happening, holding collective memory and reaching towards a world that did not yet exist.

In the urgency of the present, it is easy to experience every crisis as unprecedented and every struggle as beginning with us. But the forces shaping this moment are not entirely new. Though the forces of colonialism, extraction and division repeatedly hide themselves behind new masks, new language and new machinery, their consequences remain embedded in land, institutions, technologies, everyday life and the stories we tell. As the struggle continues, our tools change too, adapting to confront the underlying conditions of oppression that persist.

What, then, travels in the other direction?

What knowledge has survived these histories? What songs, stories, images and practices have been carried forward? What have we failed to hear?

Are we listening?

Are we learning?

Are we remembering?

What anthems are we passing on?

Remembering is not a retreat into the past. It is how we locate ourselves in the present, how we become able to act. As expressed in the whakataukī Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: we walk backwards into the future with our eyes fixed on the past. The past remains before us: not static, complete or settled, but alive with knowledge from which we continue to learn and unlearn.

Songs travel through time. If music is a time traveller, our chorus is ever present.

Across generations, communities have sung different words into unfinished struggles: land, language, dignity, liberation, survival and the possibility of living otherwise. There is hope in this persistence. We are not the first to seek futures that are difficult to imagine from inside the present, and we are not alone in seeking them now.

Through literature, visual art, film, performance, community meals, public discussion and more, Anthems of Resistance brings stories from tangata whenua, the Global South and Pōneke into conversation with one-another. It creates space to listen across different histories without collapsing their distinctions, to ask what might travel between them, and to consider how solidarity is built through attention, relationship, collective memory, poetry and song.

The struggle does not end. There is always work to be done. But knowing this need not lead to apathy or cynicism. It can release us from the burden of believing we must begin from nothing.

Anthems are epics sung together.

We find one another in the chorus.