This year Wheke Fortress carries the ahi of Te Tīmatanga through their wharekura raumati, a summer-long house of learning, exchange, and collective growth. Taking place over the warmer months, this kaupapa has brought together five irawhiti and MVPFAFF+ artists working within various mediums.

Across the summer, this wharekura raumati has culminated in the creation of six short films, formed during Auckland Pride’s Te Tīmatanga artist residency, created in collaboration with Wheke Fortress’s resident tuakana, Coco Solid. Each film speaks to the artists’ whakapapa, identities, and relationships to place. Together, the works reflect a regenerative, re-contextualised response to the knowledge acquired during Te Kura Raumati, titled Urban Taniwha.

Each piece is guided by pūrākau of the city’s unseen presences, understood here as kaitiaki and taniwha: ancestral beings of manifestation and protection, dwelling between the liminal spaces of whenua and concrete, rākau Māori and asphalt, memories of awa and clay. Urban Taniwha reveals our own curiosities, questions, and lived experiences navigating community as urban takatāpui taniwha.

Our existence blends the perceived natural world with contemporary environments, balancing the knowledge of our tūpuna with the reality we inhabit. These films offer insight into how urban takatāpui move through Tāmaki Makaurau, borrowing the rhythms and pathways of the taniwha before us: slipping into the shimmering pools of Karanga-a-hape nightlife, flowing alongside the orooro of Onehunga-based musicians, gathering in fortresses full of kaupapa and kai, gazing into a 13.8-billion-year-old past at stardome, sipping the whakapapa of tānekaha and tātaramoa, folding and collapsing the WAA during mean-as waananga seshhs or crossing the ancestral portals of the past, present and future, a.k.a returning. remembering.

Sheltered by our hāpori at Laka Studios, Factory Theatre, Wheke Fortress and Auckland Pride Tari, wāna