€18,00
Nowhere in Cycladic culture has love been defined in a singular all-encompassing manner. Forces of attraction, affection, connection, and relation were ascribed in a plurality of ways. Through symposia in Delos, the tax haven of antiquity, 17th-century transactions of love involving pirates, slaves, and Mykonians; naturist communities reliving sexual freedom in the 1960-70s and 21st-century tourists quest in search of love, free or paid; this book gathers fragments of expressions of affection across Mykonos island. Mykonos has long defined itself as a self-ruling place far away from realities lived elsewhere.
Low in stock
96 pages, 102 x 162 mm
isbn 97-89-464202-86-1
illustrations color and b/w
language English
1st print fall 2020
2nd print fall 2021
3rd print spring 2024
contents
Transactions of Love
by Nicolas Lakiotakis
To Watch every Sunset as if it was the Last One
by Juan Duque
Faces of Love
by Denis Maksimov-Gupta
Professional Hugs
by Dimitra Kondylatou
edited by
Nicolas Lakiotakis
David Bergé
Aggressively rebounding after recessions and the pandemic, sprawling landscapes of tourism in the Mediterranean continue to build upon the iconic spatial typology of sea & sun vacationing: the beach. But behind the leisurely scattered bodies and the quiescent summer shores, beachfronts are assembled as intensely ordered infrastructures for the heavy machineries of tourism. Approaching the beach as an operational socio-technical landscape, this book unpacks stories of construction, programming, and maintenance: from traces of moving sands in Lefkada island to mirror postwar developments in Delos and Mykonos islands, and from historic and bodily excursions to workings of the Athenian riviera to rituals of eco-certification under Blue Flags. The texts frame the beach as a machine, one with protocols of function and metabolic needs, studying how it directs the capture of land and bodies, while establishing forms of environmental control.
The Mechanicos (meaning ‘machinic’ in Greek) is a folk dance performed by the sponge divers of Kalymnos island, recording the crippling effects of decompression sickness and paralysis caused by increasing industrial exploitation. Today, a disproportionate number of persons with physical impairments and debilitating conditions remain largely invisible. The writing in this book points to different experiences of movement, time, and space: Whether through the creation of a vernacular sign language; a different pacing of time and projection of futurity; exchanging forms of care around a healing spring; recording the ways in which 3 generations navigate everyday interactions through a ‘broken telephone line’ of connection; or the friendship between a woman with visual impairment and her dog, Mercy, who helps her navigate the narrow busy sidewalks of central Athens. These stories contribute to imagining a different kind of mobility.
Lamentation practices can empower the potentiality to defy patriarchal orders ruling everyday life. Always a collective process, lamentation inscribes loss and vulnerability by tending bridges towards the world of the dead and the more-than-human. Gestures such as singing or breathing, gathering, and performances that exceed rationality can inspire a renewed approach to life and death, rural and urban. After all, amidst ongoing processes of extinction, how to mourn a queer activist, a Roma father, a burnt forest, an exiled body, and a ship sunken in the Mediterranean? How to experience loss not as something individual, but within an expanded continuum of pain? How to explore emotions beyond the private sphere? Through case studies and narrations, in different times and geographies surrounding the Aegean Sea, this book amplifies the echoes of collective tears to invigorate contemporary mourning practices that claim public space by grief, rage, and affect.
While the largest parts of icebergs — or islands — remain beneath the sea surface, often unmapped and perilous, a myriad of creatures and non-organic matter connect them to other lands. Nowadays, in the era of the climate crisis, what is hidden in the depths of the sea exponentially manifests the impact of anthropogenic activity on the planet. Plastic waste and pollution, deep sea mining, and undersea network infrastructures affect marine biodiversity and life on Earth at large. Mediterranean Icebergs sheds light on forms of agency, be it human, more-than-human, or machinic, that operate in marine environments, paying attention to their entanglements, encounters, and asymmetries. Addressing the interconnectedness of environmental, political, and legal issues, this book takes the Mediterranean as a starting point to discuss what is at stake for all lives depending on the planet’s seas and oceans.
Surrounded by unyielding waters, islands have long served as ideal sites of banishment: places where those deemed unfit to exist within the political order, are cast away. Today, at the edges of democracy, and as obedience increasingly becomes an imperative for public presence, the specter of exile islands resurfaces. The entry point for this book is a research trip to Gyaros, an island scarred by memories of displacement and persecution — memories today at risk of erasure and privatization. Islands of Exile weaves together stories of exiled mothers, dogs, dissidents, and psychiatric patients in the Aegean Sea, narrating how humans can carve out spaces of hope and persistence.
What does it mean to drill deep and interfere with the configuration of tectonic plates? What does it mean to hollow out and alienate islandic undergrounds? How is wealth extracted and exploited from the ground, crumbled into fragments, transformed into matter, pieces of power, moved away to be represented elsewhere? Whose lungs and souls are capitalized upon and hidden under the suffocating dust in mining shafts? To whom do the surface of the land and its underground belong? This book takes proto-industrial mining in the Aegean island of Serifos as an entry point for disclosing historical and contemporary consequences of politics of the soil through land extraction, and looks at how mineral evidence was historically produced, disseminated, and capitalized upon in the Aegean region and beyond.