Grindavik’s message to IceFish: stronger together

With permanent residence and the reopening of schools in the town only just approved, the journey quite literally set in motion by the volcanic eruptions on 10 November 2023 is hard to imagine.

Yet this year’s edition of IceFish, which has always been a regular destination for the fishing town, has permitted a very public declaration of the bonds which have preserved the spirit of the community.

“Grindavik is this iconic town of fisheries and ocean-related industries, so the old-school fisheries are of course in its DNA,” said Ásta Sigurjónsdóttir, Managing Director at the Iceland Tourism Cluster who helped initiate the community hub.

“But they have also been developing into all kinds of innovation around the fisheries and the services around them, across the whole, you could say, ecosystem or value chain of fisheries. So with IceFish this year, we decided to invite the companies to participate together under the Grindavik community banner.”

The 20 companies gathered at IceFish to showcase their services – which cross the range from chocolate production to drone technology and of course fishing – do so collectively, on identical stands without individual logos.

As Sigurjónsdóttir puts it: “There is kind of no individual here. This is a group effort to showcase what a community can do together and what the fisheries and the blue economy in Grindavik is all about.

“Some of these companies are competitors, but they are standing next to each other and saying, ‘Together we are stronger’. So that is the framework of this project here at IceFish to showcase that we are stronger together than individual companies alone.”