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 series of compact books initiated by artist David Bergé and grounded in the Aegean archipelago, the island group marked by Izmir, Athens, and Crete. A publishing experiment in embodied, critical, and material forms of writing, each kyklàda book emerges from an expansion within and beyond one central theme. Five to six contributors from different practices craft each book together, relaying knowledge derived from lived experiences on islands: archaeologies of moods, expressions of desire and grief, affection and pain, constructed landscapes, human geographies, and historical (dis)continuities.
kyklàda.press currently has 10 titles in its catalogue.