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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.
96 pages, 102 x 162 mm
isbn 978-9-464772-64-7
illustrations color and b/w
language English
1st print spring 2025
contents
The Memory of the Ocean
by James Bridle
Sea Change
by Hypatia Vourloumis
Manufacturing Icebergs
by Janine Randerson
What Legal Instruments Exist to Regulate Deep-Sea Mining?
by Geert Somers
Silent Change Beneath the Waves
by Thanos Dailianis
They Simply Switch
by Iva Radivojević & Maria F Dolores
Comforting, Inorganic Immersions
by Yorgos Efharis
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.
What can a reclining marble sculpture, conceived through a myth in Greek antiquity, tell us today about the fluidity of our gender construction? What has been the role of aesthetic and historical canons in the construction of the female and male genders? Is ‘the sleeping Hermaphrodite’ really asleep? Or has she/he been induced to a long lethargic state, punished and confined by the history of gender normalization?
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.
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.
What would be of contemporary culture if we did not recognize the impact of migration in cultural and socio-economic crossings? This book explores human migration in different times, contexts, and geographies surrounding the Aegean Sea. Through an assemblage of voices, lived experiences, historical documents, urban and rural dislocations, this publication examines responses to mobility of the ones on the move, and of the ones living in the destinations the former are heading to. It speaks of the sacrifices one is forced to make en route and at its antipode; the implications of voluntary migration to a place, steered by investment in real estate.
The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.