The Subantarctic island of South Georgia is a marvel of the natural world. It’s a hundred mile long mountain range that erupts out of the Southern Ocean, with more marine wildlife than anywhere else on the planet. Penguins and fur seals here are counted by the million. It’s a scene that’s all the more extraordinary given that this was also the birthplace of the Antarctic whaling industry, with all the environmental destruction that ensued.
Visitors to South Georgia are often overwhelmed by the beauty of the island and the sheer density of its wildlife. But what happens when you send an artist there? How do they respond to its environment? The sculptor Michael Visocchi is one such artist. We spoke to him about Commensalis, The Spirit Tables of South Georgia, a site-specific artwork he is currently creating for the South Georgia Heritage Trust (SGHT), to commemorate the devastation of the whaling industry – and the island’s ecological recovery.
Whaling’s dark history
The first Antarctic whaling ship sailed into the harbour at Grytviken exactly 120 years ago in 1904. It found the waters around South Georgia incredibly rich in whales: for the first season of operating, the whalers didn’t even have to leave the bay to land as many humpback whales as they could process.
Within a decade, South Georgia’s humpbacks had been hunted almost to obliteration and the ships switched to other species. By the time that industrial whaling was finally abandoned on the island in 1966, a staggering 175,250 whales had been killed here to be rendered down into barrels of oil and turned into margarine, soap and nitroglycerine for explosives.
Grytviken is the only one of South Georgia’s whaling stations that it’s safe to visit today, and visitors here can explore a landscape littered with the rusting machinery of the past. It’s a story that the SGHT is keen to commemorate, by acknowledging the dark past as well as celebrating the island’s recovery.
‘Thankfully, the tide is now turning, and whales are slowly returning to the island’s waters thanks to ongoing conservation efforts,’ Alison Neil, CEO of the trust, told me. Astonishingly, recent surveys indicate that humpback whales numbers here have returned to the numbers they were in the pre-whaling days, and since the start of the 2024/25 visitor season, the trust’s staff have even had multiple sightings of humpbacks in the bay where Grytviken sits: something that would have been unthinkable even in recent years. This is where the Commensalis project comes in.
‘Art is a really powerful way of conveying a complex message and getting people interested and involved in conservation,’ Neil said. ‘Commensalis will enrich the on-island experience of all who visit and will seamlessly tell the extraordinary story of South Georgia’s dark past to becoming an international beacon of hope as an ecosystem in recovery.’
The Spirit Tables
The artist chosen for the commission is Michael Visocchi, a Scottish landscape artist and sculptor who creates site-specific artworks that meditate on the marks and traces that people leave in and on our landscapes. His previous work includes Gilt of Cain, a monument commemorating the bicentenary of the British abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, erected on the site of an old church in the City of London that played a crucial role in precipitating the abolition of the slave trade.
Commensalis is a piece on a much grander scale, which will be erected on Grytviken’s flensing plan: the wide area at the heart of the old station where the whales were hauled ashore to be processed. It’s a vast and empty area, now framed by the immense chains one needed for such grisly business.
‘Visiting Grytviken gives one a jolt in a sense,’ Visocchi told me, speaking from his workshop. ‘It lays bare the perfunctory mechanics of a process I think lots of us would rather not contemplate. The station itself is a memorial to our expediency and our cruelty, but also to our ingenuity and endeavour. It sits in a liminal space between all of these conflicting ideas.’
Commensalis aims to respond to this – and the whaling machinery whose purpose is often hard to divine to a modern mind – with a series of what Visocchi calls Spirit Tables. A series of low drum-like tables of Corten steel will be set into the flensing plan, with a design that deliberately echoes that of Grytviken’s enormous whale oil storage tanks. Each ‘table’ will be covered with rivets arranged in the shape of nightingale charts to represent the tens and hundreds of thousand whales hunted here.
‘I wanted to mark this breathtaking and devastating fact and to essentially memorialise those whales. I’ve done this by using the steel rivet as a unit of measure. But the work also celebrates the fact that many of the six species of whale taken during the whaling years are now beginning to repopulate the Southern Ocean once again.’
The bright rivets will reflect the broad South Georgia sky and, it’s hoped, their reflections will be seen by visiting ships reflecting the light as a beacon of hope. To further embed the island’s history in the piece, in November the SGHT were able to collect original rivets from the ruined whaling station at Stromness Harbour for Visocchi to use. Each of these original rivets will represent 60 whales caught in South Georgia’s waters.
Impressions of Grytviken
When Visocchi first won the commission from the SGHT, he had yet to set foot on South Georgia, but has now made two extended visits. They were experiences that made a powerful impression on him.
‘Oh, I felt a heady mix of awe and reverie of course [on that first visit],’ he said. ‘But amidst those emotions I guess I felt a certain amount of guilt too if I’m honest. It’s so beautiful, exquisite and awesome. Seeing and walking on the island is a little like that conflicting feeling you get when walking onto freshly fallen snow. There’s a part of me that felt enormously clumsy and out of step with the natural world.’ When I asked him about the experience of sailing there – which takes a minimum of two days from the nearest land – he nods at the thought of all the paraphernalia required to get you there safely. ‘It’s a world away from watching a seal or a penguin land magically onto the shore, or a giant petrel gliding in off of the wind,’ he said.
Under construction
Now back in his workshop, Visocchi has begun construction of the Key Table, the first and largest part of the sculpture. The plan is to exhibit it in Dundee, the home of the SGHT in June 2025, before shipping it south so that visitors to South Georgia can enjoy it from the start of the 2025/26 tourism season on the island. In keeping with the site-specific resonance of the project, the Key Table will be displayed in Dundee between V&A Dundee at the dry dock that’s home to RRS Discovery. Although the ship is best associated with the polar explorers Scott and Shackleton (the latter who is buried on South Georgia), in the 1920s it was outfitted as a scientific research vessel to work in South Georgia’s waters, and visited Grytviken many times.
‘[South Georgia] really pushed me to question how we humans carry ourselves through our world, bringing into focus the chaos and disruption and damage we often cause,’ Visocchi concluded. ‘To me, it holds a mirror up to our existence. It intensifies a feeling of humanness if you like. Layer onto these thoughts the heart stopping beauty of the physicality of the island and the sheer exquisiteness of its wildlife then it can truly be an emotionally exhausting place to visit. The tears will likely follow soon after you arrive.’
He hopes that by telling the dual story of whaling and recovery, he hopes that Commensalis can add to Grytviken’s landscape in as sensitive and clear and thoughtful a way as possible.
There’s one last question: what does Commensalis actually mean? In response, Michael holds up the shiny head of one his rivets. As well as echoing the machinery of whaling he says, the rivet heads also evoke the barnacles that grow naturally on many whales. The biological relationship between whale and barnacle is a type of symbiosis known as commensalism, he tells me. ‘One species is reliant on the other, but neither is harmed in that relationship.’ Perhaps, he suggested, we can now foster a similar relationship with the whales we once drove to the brink of extinction.
As we consider the barren flensing plan, and the joy of the humpbacks being spotted again in Grytviken’s bay, it’s a hopeful thought for the future.
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Swoop Antarctica is proud to be a supporter of the Commensalis project through the Swoop Conservation Fund.
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