First music festival in East Greenland aims to rewrite Tasiilaq’s narrative

Tasiilaq will host its first music festival next week as a creative response to what local organisers describe as the town’s persistent negative reputation.

The four-day IKUMA Festival opens on Wednesday, featuring workshops for children and performances by Greenlandic artists including Rasmus Lyberth. The event is entirely organised by a group of childhood friends from Tasiilaq who say they want to shift attention from social challenges to local pride.

“We want to give young people a reason to live and to dream,” said Carl Florian Sørensen, one of the festival’s co-founders, speaking in Nuuk the day before the team flew back to Tasiilaq. “We will fight for this town until we drop.”

The organisers acknowledge the town’s documented struggles, including periods with the highest suicide rates in Greenland, but emphasise the broader reality of life in the community.

“The narrative about East Greenland has taken over, and people are systematically closing it down,” Sørensen said. “Tasiilaq is not only the worst place in the world. That is unfair and simply not true.”

The festival includes a music workshop for local children, inspired by the organisers’ own childhood dream of touring the United States. The four friends grew up playing music together and now aim to reignite that creative spark in Tasiilaq.

Tasiilaq, founded in 1894 as Ammassalik, is Greenland’s largest town on the east coast. Its steep, snow-capped mountains and colourful houses frame a community of nearly 2,000 residents. Despite its remote location, the town faces growing concerns about isolation after Icelandair announced plans to reduce direct international flights to just three and a half months a year starting in 2027.

Local businesses have warned that the cut could accelerate depopulation and erode cultural heritage. In May, the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq described Tasiilaq as “in the midst of a serious crisis,” citing rising unemployment.

The organisers remain optimistic. “Our coastline is as long as West Greenland’s,” said Pappi Zaki Henriksen, another co-founder. “We may not be as many people, but we are still here.”

The festival’s name, IKUMA, reflects the organisers’ shared vision. The group describes itself as a tightly knit team with complementary skills: one handles logistics, another leads creative direction, and a third brings practical problem-solving. They say their long-standing friendship and mutual trust are central to the project.

“Either we all win together, or we all crash together,” Sørensen said, adjusting a homemade cap embroidered with the festival’s name.