Dry heat on your body. Bronze grasses and rocks, cactae, aloe vera. Concrete, asphalt, and marble, the Cycladic Landscape is both rural and urban: the Aegean Archipelago, touching south-east of Athens and Izmir, extends into the city hills.
Through navigation, the westernized sense of perspective has established a common horizon, simplifying islands as visual spots at the surface of the sea. Islands are not exotic entities alone in the sea waters. Islands remain interconnected with the mainland and each other, from the top of the mountains to the hidden topographies of the sea bed: a myriad of creatures and non-organic matter which lives in constant symbiosis with water; tectonic plates, fossil fuel pipes, and data cables.
kyklàda.press is a publishing experiment directed by artist David Bergé and situated in the archipelago of the Aegean Sea. kyklàda.press takes the form of a series of compact and unlaminated books, each emerging from one central theme—exploring embodied, situated, and material approaches to writing. Five to six contributors from different disciplines craft each book together, relaying knowledge derived from lived experiences on islands: archaeologies of moods and emotions, rituals of everyday life and struggle, human geographies, and critical history. kyklàda.press functions both as a site of knowledge production and a space for interdisciplinary artistic experiment. With 13 titles currently available, the series continues to expand its catalogue as an evolving counter-culture archive engaging with island ecologies, materialities, and temporalities.