Collective Expressions of Pain, Rage and Affection

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.

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.