Draft:Kyklàda.press

kyklàda.press is an Athens-based imprint founded and directed by artist David Bergé. It was co-founded together with artists Dimitra Kondylatou, Juan Duque, and Nicolas Lakiotakis in 2020. kyklàda.press consists of a growing series of compact softcover books with unified design, featuring textual and visual essays. Each book focuses on a specific theme relevant to the Cycladic islands of the Aegean Sea, often echoing issues encountered by island communities around the world.

Concept and Aims
The aim of the press is to challenge the commonly held and universalizing view of the islands as exotic, leisure-oriented, remote, and disconnected places. It does so by adopting lenses from critical mobility studies and critical island studies to discuss aspects of the islands’ interconnection and mutual dependencies with the mainland, to explore the contemporary expressions of desire in their longer history, and to reveal their infrastructural and heavily artificial landscape.

The imprint was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic as a response to the fatigue of continuous online presence. It developed as an experiment in collective writing and editing, in which contributors from different fields and practices collaboratively craft the book, its focus, and its structure through continuous exchanges, field trips, and writing retreats. In addition, kyklàda.press seeks to foster critical writings that relay knowledge which is not only bibliographic, but also embodied, and derived from direct experience of the landscape and its people.

In addition to the book series, collaborators at kyklàda.press develop complementary settings to enhance and present the project. In 2023, George Papam in collaboration with kyklàda.press were awarded the Yale Environmental Humanities Grant to research the persistence of tourism imaginaries in the Cyclades. In 2021, while the world still experienced unprecedented restrictions in moving and assembling, David Bergé created ‘The Conscious Effort Fort,’ an installation environment for reading and writing in the proximity of others.

Funding and organizational model
kyklàda.press is an imprint within PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPANDED PUBLISHING ATHENS, a not-for-profit publishing platform. According to the imprint's website, the endeavor was initiated with start-up capital from a government of Brussels Covid-19 recovery fund in 2020. Thereafter, production costs are covered to a large degree by sales, and to a smaller degree by occasional grants and funding from cultural organizations. Despite its small-scale and self-funding structure, kyklàda.press compensates all its contributors and collaborators.

Catalogue and Contributors
Current or previous editors include David Bergé, Daphne Dragona, Juan Duque, Sofia Grigoriadou, Milica Ivić, Dimitra Kondylatou, Nicolas Lakiotakis, Eliana Otta, Asli Özdoyuran, George Papam, Sanem Su Avci, Tonia Tzirita Zacharatou, and Lydia Xynogala.

Current or previous authors include Gloria Anzaldua, David Bergé, Paloma Bosquê, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Matilde Cordoba Azcarate, Arturo Desimone, Juan Duque, Hülya Ertas, Hannah Freed-Thall, Eleni Grapsa, Sofia Grigoriadou, Trajal Harrell, Milica Ivic, Sharon Kanach, Phevos Kallitsis, Valentina Karga, Dimitra Kondylatou, Nicolas Lakiotakis, Debra Levine, Denis Maksimov Gupta, Eliana Otta, Asli Özdoyuran, George Papam, Christina Phoebe, Petros Phokaides, Paul B. Preciado, Spyros Rennt, Anna Run Tryggvadóttir, Antigone Samellas, Sven Sterken, Mimi Sheller, Angelos Varvarousis, Lorena Vicini, Mâkhi Xenakis, Lydia Xynogala, and Liwaa Yazji.

The creation of the design grid of the books was done by Costas Kalogeropoulos and overseen by Roland Brauchli and David Bergé.

As of 2023, kyklàda.press has published the titles listed below:


 * Islands After Tourism: Escaping the Monocultures of Leisure, 2023 (ISBN: 9789464772623).
 * Urban Lament: Collective Expressions of Pain, Rage, and Affection, 2023, (ISBN: 9789464772616).
 * The Beach Machine: Making and Operating the Mediterranean Coastline, 2022 (ISBN: 9789464202892).
 * Bodies of Extraction: Underneath the Grounds of Islands, 2022 (ISBN: 9789464202885).
 * Architectures of Healing: Cure Through Sleep, Touch, and Travel, 2021 (ISBN: 9789464202854).
 * (Forced) Movement: Across the Aegean Archipelago, 2021 (ISBN: 9789464202847).
 * The Sleeping Hermaphrodite: Waking up from a Lethargic Confinement, 2020 (ISBN: 9789464202830)
 * The Architect is Absent: Approaching the Cycladic Holiday House, 2020 (ISBN: 9789464202823).
 * Public Health in Crisis: Confined in the Aegean Archipelago, 2020 (ISBN: 9789464202878).
 * Free Love, Paid Love: Expressions of Affection in Mykonos, 2020 (ISBN: 9789464202861).