Free Love Paid Love

Expressions of Affection in Mykonos

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.

contributions by Nicolas Lakiotakis, Juan Duque, Denis Maksimov, Dimitra Kondylatou

The Architect is Absent

Approaching the Cycladic Holiday House

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.

contributions by Sharon Kanach, Hulya Ertas, Mâkhi Xenakis, Sven Sterken, David Bergé, Dimitra Kondylatou

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite

Waking up from a Lethargic Confinement

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?

contributions by Paul B. Preciado, Juan Duque, Nicolas Lakiotakis, Denis Maksimov 

Public Health in Crisis

Confined in the Aegean Archipelago

Epidemics and pandemics undermine societies and highlight the vulnerability of relations people have created to the land, other species, and each other. This book presents fragments of disease management in the Mediterranean from the 15th-century onwards and in the Aegean Archipelago in the last two centuries. From religious to medical approaches to the Bubonic Plague, through the creation of lazarettos, to the famine in occupied Syros, to ghost ships drifting on the Mediterranean: citizens are forced to avoid citizens. Public health in crisis: confinement versus mobility, awakening memories of totalitarian regimes.

contributions by Dimitra Kondylatou, Nicolas Lakiotakis, Hulya Ertas, David Bergé

The production of this book received the support of Goethe-Institut Athen.