From 17 to 22 November, Linecheck Music Meeting & Festival returns to Milan and, with its 2025 edition titled “a beautiful presence”, establishes itself as an ecosystem where music becomes a living, transformative force. Between live shows, talks and special projects spread across BASE Milano, the Auditorium San Fedele and DumBO Bologna, there is a moment when the festival stops being a simple schedule of events and opens up into a fragile yet powerful territory in which sound becomes story, body and archive: this moment is TAKKUUK, the audiovisual installation that runs through the Social Change Summit and, starting from BASE, reshapes the audience’s understanding of what music can be today.

The project was born from the encounter between Bicep, EarthSonic, In Place of War and a group of seven Indigenous artists from Greenland, Norway, Sweden and Canada. It is not just a collaborative work, but an intimate balance of voices, memories and territories. TAKKUUK forces you to step into something larger than yourself. It is a film-installation that becomes space, an emotional landscape where Indigenous languages coexist with electronic sounds, where the movement of the images follows the rhythm of a tradition that persists.

And it is precisely the word resistance that underpins the entire project. Katarina Barruk puts it with disarming simplicity: “We fight every day to keep the language and the culture alive.” It’s a sentence that weighs heavily, especially when heard in a context like Linecheck, which this year reflects on cultural capitalism, new festival economies, sound politics and emerging technologies. Faced with these trajectories, TAKKUUK brings everything back to the essentials: who are we when our landscape changes? What remains when the Arctic melts and, with it, stories, gestures and words dissolve?

Charlotte Qamaniq, Inuit performer, sums it up with clarity: on the one hand, the celebration of an extraordinary culture; on the other, an urgent awareness of the effects of climate change. It is precisely in this double perspective that TAKKUUK finds its strength. Not a message, but an alliance. Not an alarm, but an invitation to look.

Bicep, for their part, avoid aestheticising the theme: they listen, amplify, and create a meeting ground. Their approach allows the project to work as a device of attention, a different way of approaching stories that are often misunderstood or told from afar. As Niilas, one of the artists involved, notes: when such a well-known duo chooses to collaborate with Indigenous performers, it normalises a relationship that all too often is seen as “exotic”. And this normalisation is a political act before it is an artistic one.

Within Linecheck, TAKKUUK thus becomes a kind of counterpoint: while the talks explore AI, data, markets and sustainability, the installation brings the discussion back to sound as embodied memory. It reminds us that music is never born in the abstract: it is born in a body, in a territory, in a language that risks disappearing. And remembering this is not just a poetic exercise: it is an act of cultural responsibility.

What ultimately resonates most is the sense of “presence” that the festival embraces as the theme of its eleventh edition. A presence that TAKKUUK makes tangible: alive, vulnerable, necessary.
Linecheck this year asks us to think of music as a driver of transformation. Takkuuk, quite simply, proves it.