Glacial blue ice from the Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) Ice Sheet will be transformed into a reverential sculpture, a reliquary, traveling the world as a frozen ambassador, representing the interests of the Arctic environment and the Indigenous peoples who reside there.
Website Credits: Photography, website design and build by Emile Holba. Illustrations by Brian Goggin. Audio by Charles Monroe-Kane. Text by Brian Goggin, Charles Monroe-Kane and Emile Holba. All rights reserved by Sermersuaq: The Last Ice Project. No reproduction without prior permission.
Learn about the project’s production team. Project Lead & Lead Artist: Brian Goggin on Ilulissat Kangerlua (Ilulissat Iceford). Photo by Emile Holba.
Brian Goggin (San Fransico, USA).
Goggin is an American sculptor and installation artist with a studio in the Mission District of San Francisco. He is a prolific creator of unique art, usually sculptural and public. Defenestration was a beloved outdoor installation on the side of the Hugo Hotel in San Francisco for 17 years (1996-2013), part of a series of installations of seemingly animated furniture installed on the sides of urban buildings in San Francisco.
His art openings often include large-scale performance-art happenings. He is a member of the Cacophony Society, where ‘gorilla art’ is their visionary expression, and whose early members became the primary organizers of the Burning Man event. See Gatekeeper of Your Impossible Dreams KQED Arts - Goggin studied filmmaking and painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Art and English Literature at Homerton College, Cambridge.
https://metaphorm.org Radio Documentary & Podcast Lead: Charles Monroe-Kane in Ilulissat. Photo by Emile Holba.
Charles Monroe-Kane (Wisconsin, USA).
Charles is a Peabody award-winning journalist with over 25 years of on-air radio experience. Charles is an interviewer and senior producer for To the Best of Our Knowledge (heard on some 265 NPR stations). He has also served as executive producer of two nationally syndicated public radio programs and has produced radio pieces on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition as well as on Snap Judgment and This American Life.
His documentary on Jim Thorpe won the 2023 best radio feature award by the Indigenous Journalist Association. He is a recording artist with A.M.P.RECS, a music label based in Guadalajara México that focuses on electroacoustic and experimental works.
Emile, an award-winning and distinguished photographer, specialises in portraiture and long-term documentary work. He is fascinated by communities, creative arts, the cosmos, scientific endeavours, and the intricacies of climate change. His work emphasises the significance of place and always considers the often-hidden subtext behind a picture’s subject focus and its narrative significance when part of a larger story.
Emile’s work has been published in esteemed publications such as Bloomberg, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Financial Times, National Geographic, British Journal of Photography, Huck Magazine, Wonderland Magazine, PhotoVogue, and The Economist, among others.
In addition to his photographic pursuits, Emile has made contributions to broadcasting and the arts. He created a five-part BBC Radio 4 series called Welcome to the Quiet Zone and co-produces the annual Ice Music Festival.
Emile has received high commendations in the Belfast International Photo Festival’s Open Submission in both 2022 and 2023. His project, titled Arktisk Grenseland, is available as Field Notes 015 at Another Place Press. He was also a winner in the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain 2019, and his work is featured in Portrait of Britain Vol 2 by Hoxton Mini Press.
In March 2024, Emile travelled to Ilulissat to co-produce a special edition of the Ice Music Festival called the ‘Greenland Sessions’. While in town, seeking a deeper connection with the area, he created a monograph titled Avannaata’s Analogous Light.
Three-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and animation director, Jon Halperin, whose recent film A Trip to Infinity is premiering on Netflix. The film was in the Netflix Top Ten in 32 countries, and a scene went viral on TikTok with 65 million views.
Halperin’s films have been screened at festivals around the world and on National Geographic, Amazon, PBS, Discovery, and History. He is currently Executive Producing the new series of feature documentaries, Unknown, for Netflix, and a feature documentary about what may be the first fusion reactor ever built.
http://room608.com Project Composer: Terje Isungset. Recording in -40ºC in Nunavut, Canada. Photo by Emile Holba.
Terje Isungset (Bergen, Norway).
Terje is a Norwegian composer Internationally known as the pioneer of Ice Music.
Terje created the musical concept in 1999 as an extension to his interest in creating sound from naturally born materials. By seeking out different types of ice and playing them both acoustically and amplified, Terje successfully refined the techniques required to allow ice to ‘sing’, and in the following year Terje was commissioned to perform Ice Music by creating the world’s first Ice Music concert inside a frozen waterfall in Lillehammer, Norway.
In 2001 Terje recorded the first of 10 Ice Music albums, with the first release called ‘Iceman Is’. His second ice music album ‘Igloo’ which attracted critical acclaim, was celebrated in the winter of 2006, by being played at the inaugural Ice Music Festival in Geilo, Norway.
https://terjeisungset.no Page credits: Photography (unless stated seperately) by Emile Holba. Bio texts submitted by each Collaborator.
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