Hope. A big word, charged with religious and political connotations. Often enough, hopes fail. Or they are misused as a smokescreen. In our present era of multiple crises, clinging to a “principle of hope” (Ernst Bloch) seems downright naive. What’s more: If one were to surrender to the apocalyptic background noise of the present, with its wars, authoritarian violence, lies and sedition, ecological calamity, and cyber-fascist menaces to the future, you would have to be downright crazy to still believe in a better tomorrow.

And yet it is perhaps precisely this madness that can twist around perspectives. In his performance After Hope, Anton Kats recounts the fate of the cargo ship Vishwa Asha (Universal Hope), built in 1974 in the Ukrainian Dnipro Delta (then part of the Soviet Union). The ghost ship is presumed lost amid the turmoil of today’s war. Anton Kats poses a riddle for us: How many grains of sand at the bottom of the Dnipro River would be needed for hope to take root there? Hope4Hope is the name of a group exhibition at the donaufestival 2026 that ties in with the leitmotif. And in the Dominican Church, Yann Marussich’s raised fist will stretch upwards out of a bathtub full of broken glass shards.

Mad Hope: It is the courage to speculate about untried forms of coexistence, a smallscale, decentralised rebellion against reality. Cultural scientist Terry Eagleton calls this tenacious belief in change “hope without optimism.” Another take is offered by philosopher Gabriel Marcel: “Perhaps all is lost, but we are not.”

This insight pervades HOLD&RESIST_a springrite, a first-time collaboration initiated by donaufestival between the performance group Liquid Loft and the meta-rock band Radian, another act presented in the Dominican Church. The aim is to endure extreme physical exertion, to push a pose to its limits, to maintain a (political) position.

“When the world is friction, lube isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity,” says electropunk icon Peaches, expressing the queer-feminist hope that reverberates in her new album No Lube So Rude, which she will introduce us to in Krems. Jazz drummer Makaya McCraven named one of his albums Universal Beings – a title that conveys a desire for togetherness. Music as a collective experience between happiness and madness is also celebrated by the folk punk quartet The New Eves or the hyper-euphoric formation caroline.

In his new, spiritually charged post-rap album Eroica II: Christian Nihilism, Chino Amobi professes his belief in “embracing the chaos,” also on stage in Krems. At the end of his album, he says, with appropriate disregard for the Trumpeteer: “You want it darker (…) But God don’t care about the White House, come through the dark like a light house.”

Thomas Edlinger
Artistic Direction