In the Studio: Michael Visocchi
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In an old schoolroom in the Scottish Highlands, sculptor Michael Visocchi is working on Commensalis, a huge work that will be installed thousands of miles away, in Grytviken, an abandoned whaling station on the Antarctic island of South Georgia. Whaling ships and equipment were taken Grytviken and assembled there. Now it is an industrial scrapyard; ships rust on the shore, huge tanks decay and millions of left over rivets remain. Visocchi was struck by the similarity of shape of these rivets and the bumps of the barnacles on the bodies of living whales.Visocchi talks to presenter Julian May as he works on this project which is challenging in so many ways. South Georgia has no permanent population, so is a public artwork appropriate?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Julian May and the studio we're going to be in belongs to the sculptor Michael Vesoki. Michael was the youngest artist to be made a member of the Royal Scottish Academy and he's a winner of the prestigious Gerwood Sculpture Prize. |
| 0:23.1 | When I arrive he's |
| 0:24.7 | working on a very ambitious |
| 0:26.0 | and lengthy project. He had the idea |
| 0:28.9 | five years ago and it's still a long |
| 0:31.0 | way from completion. |
| 0:33.0 | The work is called |
| 0:34.0 | Comensales. Don't worry, we'll explain |
| 0:36.8 | what that means. |
| 0:38.3 | And it will be seven round, rust-brown steel tables each five metres across, dotted with shiny rivets. |
| 0:46.3 | The significance of those will become clear too. |
| 0:50.3 | This is mild steel. So I cut this flat bar here. Michael Studio is full of industrial equipment, machine tools, welding gear. |
| 1:00.0 | It's on the edge of the Cairngorn Mountains in the north-east of Scotland. |
| 1:05.0 | The site of the sculpture is some way off, 7,890 miles away at Gritviken, |
| 1:12.8 | an abandoned whaling station on the island of South Georgia. |
| 1:20.9 | We've got this sophisticated and frankly alarming machinery in your studio, |
| 1:26.5 | but it's a nice, light, airy room with windows in the roof. |
| 1:32.2 | A fantastic array of shelves with all manner of chisels and set squares and pliers. |
| 1:40.8 | What was this before it was your studio for making sculpture? This is an own rural school, |
| 1:46.5 | so this is the school room, and this school would have been built as part of the 1870s |
| 1:52.0 | Education Act, putting schools across the landscape. It had been closed since 1968, so it needed |
| 1:58.8 | quite a bit of work. It's actually a really lovely space I'm very |
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