Música Viva Festival 2026

Festival Música Viva 2026 asserts itself as a stage of aesthetic and ethical resistance in a world traversed by profound crises: the consolidation of hegemonic powers, the deepening of inequalities, the normalisation of tyranny, massacre, and the progressive erosion of humanity and nature. Confronted with this state of the world, the festival embraces insurgency as a vital necessity — a conscious gesture against inertia, silencing, and indifference. In this 32nd edition, Insurgency is simultaneously poetic and political. Musical creation emerges as an act of confrontation, of deviation and refusal, affirming art as a sensitive weapon against structural violence, dehumanisation, and the logic of fear. The works presented do not seek comfort, but friction: they question, expose wounds, open fissures, and summon new forms of listening, thought, and presence. The programme crosses languages, generations, and geographies, bringing together artists who challenge dominant models, explore the limits of sound, the body, the word, and technology, and affirm contemporaneity as a space of urgency, plurality, and risk — encounters that propose and build a journey of intense listening and critical reflection on our time. Festival Música Viva this year invites the poetic word as a political and sonic act: at each concert, poets, writers, and actors read poems on insurgency, resistance, and freedom — voices that enter into dialogue with the musical works, expanding the field of meaning of each encounter. Poetry does not illustrate music, nor music poetry, but both inhabit the same space of risk, and together construct a form of presence that refuses passivity. Poetry and texts by Shahd Wadi, Gisela Casimiro, Jorge de Sena, Luís de Camões, Audre Lorde, Mrika Sefa, Sidónio Muralha, Gonçalo M. Tavares, and Mário Dionísio, read by Shahd Wadi, Gisela Casimiro, Rosinda Costa, Mrika Sefa, Marta Domingues, João Morales, Joana Santos, and Miguel Azguime. At Festival Música Viva 2026, to rise up is to resist the homogenisation of taste, to create against the violence of repetition, to affirm art as a place of freedom, radical imagination, and responsibility. In a world in collapse, musical art and poetic art become simultaneous acts of insubmission and active hope.