TAKKUUK: An Audio-Visual Experience Through Indigenous Culture
“As climate change increasingly impacts Arctic landscape and communities, it will also impact how all of us live, wherever we are in the world. We hope these raw first-hand stories coming from the Indigenous artists and contributors in TAKKUUK will help to humanise those effects and inspire people to learn more about it” - BICEP
As we face an ongoing climate crisis, no community is under quite as much threat as the indigenous communities of the Arctic where effects of this crisis are already in show, such as increased water temperature, record low sea ice coverage, reduced snow cover and thawing permafrost. As well as the environmental effects, there is also an increasing political and economic interest in the Arctic leading to a surge of industrial and social activity; this becomes a large threat to their language which is deeply tied to their unique surroundings and way of life- there are already a number of endangered indigenous languages due to the dying out of people’s cultures and how drastically their surroundings are changing.
This is why it’s so important that we are featuring this project, TAKKUUK, named after the Inuktitut word for look. An immersive audio-visual wall-to-wall installation that - as the name suggests - allows us to have a deeper look into the lifestyle of these artists as they share their stories on Arctic indigenous life, culture and climate change problems that they face.
What is TAKKUUK?
With music created by BICEP - the electronic music duo of Andy Ferguson and Matthew McBriar - and visuals refined by visual artist Zak Norman and filmmaker Charlie Miller, the project also showcases a number of indigenous voices including Katarina Barruk, Andachan, Sebastian Enequist (from Sound of the Damned), Tarrak, Nuija, and Silla, all recorded in 2024 by Detroit-based producer Matthew Dear during the Iceland Airwaves Festival in Reykjavík. They first premiered the TAKKUUK experience in July 2025 in Outernet London on their large wrap-around screens, presenting a collaborative album combining the sounds of Greenlandic heavy metal and EDM, complete with stunning visuals of the artists’ native homelands.
They have worked hard as musicians to combine each artists’ different style into a story that tells the audience of the many cultures in the album, while still giving each of them a chance to be unique; with genres ranging from Silla’s traditional Inuit throat singing to Tarrak’s rapping exclusively in his mother’s tongue of Kalaallisut, to Sebastian Enequist’s Greenlandic heavy metal and Katarina Barruk’s mix of pop and traditional joik while singing in her father’s tongue Ume Sámi.
And it’s all been made in partnership with In Place of War, a charity organisation that uses creativity in places impacted by climate crises and as a tool for positive change, as a part of their EarthSonic programme- a global project using performances from musicians, scientists, climate activists and indigenous communities to tell the story of climate change. They also give the opportunity to show off a wide range of different communities and peoples while telling their important individual stories.
We here at TOM are lucky enough to have this wonderful event showing this May as part of our Of Land, Sea and Sky programme for the Brighton Festival, in our In The Box format with four walls of projection for a fully immersive experience. Our programme is all about rediscovering your bond with nature and understanding more about our planet, and how we can help to save it. Getting the opportunity to hear about how not only Arctic indigenous people’s lands are under threat, but also their cultures and languages, is a very unique but important one and it promises to be a very wonderful and eye-opening experience.